VAT for sneaker resellers: margin scheme vs standard

Almost every VAT question a European reseller faces comes down to which of two schemes a sale falls under. Standard VAT charges VAT on the full sale price; you can normally reclaim the input VAT you paid when you bought the stock. The margin scheme (the second-hand or differential-taxation scheme) charges VAT only on your profit margin — the difference between what you bought for and what you sold for — and you do not reclaim input VAT, because there was none to reclaim.

The margin scheme exists precisely for goods like used and many resale sneakers, bought from private individuals or other margin-scheme sellers where no reclaimable VAT changed hands. Charging full standard VAT on those would tax the same value twice. So the scheme isn't a loophole; it's the correct treatment for a large slice of resale stock.

Which scheme is correct depends mostly on two things: how you acquired the stock and your registration status. The general shape of it, in operator terms:

• Bought from a private seller or a margin-scheme dealer, no reclaimable VAT → the margin scheme is typically the right home, and VAT is due only on your margin.
• Bought from a VAT-registered business with a proper VAT invoice → you generally reclaim that input VAT and sell under standard VAT.
• Selling B2B across an EU border to a VAT-registered buyer → this is usually a zero-rated intra-Community supply (more on the marketplaces below), which is a different lane again.

Two practical constraints flow from the choice. A margin-scheme invoice must not show VAT as a separate, reclaimable line — it carries a margin-scheme note instead — so your buyer can't deduct VAT from it. And you can't mix the schemes on a single line: a pair is sold either on margin or standard, not both. Getting the scheme right per sale is what makes every document downstream consistent.

Why does the choice matter to your bottom line, not just your paperwork? Under standard VAT you charge VAT on the whole price but reclaim the input VAT you paid, so for stock bought with a proper VAT invoice it's often neutral-to-favourable. Under the margin scheme you charge VAT only on the spread, which is usually the better outcome for stock bought without reclaimable VAT — but you forfeit any input-VAT reclaim and you can't issue a buyer a deductible VAT line. Neither is universally "cheaper"; the right one depends on how you sourced the pair.

The margin scheme also carries its own record-keeping weight. Because VAT is due on the difference between purchase and sale price, you must be able to evidence both for every margin-scheme item — a clean purchase record per unit, not just a sales total. That's precisely the per-unit cost basis captured at intake, which is one practical reason to record cost the moment stock arrives rather than reconstructing it at quarter-end.

If you sell across both schemes — many resellers do — the discipline is to tag each pair correctly at the point of sale and let the per-profile and per-controller VAT settings carry that tag through to the invoice, so the two never get blended on one document.

The moment reselling stops being a hobby and starts being a business, registration enters the picture — and this is the area where generic advice does the most damage, because the numbers genuinely differ by country.

A few things are worth knowing exist, even though you must confirm the specifics locally. Most EU countries have a domestic VAT-registration threshold below which small sellers needn't register, and those thresholds vary widely. For cross-border B2C sales into other EU countries there's an EU-wide distance-selling threshold above which you charge the buyer's local VAT rate — usually handled through the One-Stop-Shop (OSS) return rather than registering in every country. And opting into the margin scheme, or out of it, has its own conditions and record-keeping requirements.

This is the part resellers underestimate: the same pair, sold for the same number, is treated differently depending on the marketplace, because each platform receives goods in a different country and runs a different seller setup. The big distinction is B2B versus B2C.

The takeaway isn't the exact mechanics of any one platform — those change, and you should confirm each from the platform itself — it's that net payout and VAT treatment move together. A sale routed B2B zero-rated lands differently from the same sticker sold B2C with local VAT baked in. Don't compare headline prices across these; compare what actually lands after fees and VAT with the Price Comparator, then decide where the pair should sell.

RestocksAIO doesn't decide your VAT position for you — your accountant does — but it does make the position you've decided on consistent across every price, payout and document. VAT lives in a few connected places.

First, VAT mode is set per business profile and per controller, including a dedicated margin-scheme VAT setting, so a profile or a controller marked margin-scheme produces margin-scheme paperwork and never a standard-VAT invoice by accident. Second, your Lowest Payout is VAT-adjusted per account — meaning a higher sticker offer can correctly fall below your real floor once its VAT treatment (including the margin scheme) is applied, and Bricker and the Offer Sniper both respect that. Third, the Calculator includes a quick VAT calculator and a per-site payout calculator so you can sanity-check a number before you commit it.

If you're a German seller shipping B2B into another EU country, the entry certificate — the Gelangensbestätigung — is the document that proves the goods actually crossed the border, which is what lets you zero-rate the intra-Community supply. It's mandatory under German tax law (§17a UStDV) for these B2B EU transactions, and it's the evidence you'll want if a VAT-exemption claim is ever questioned.

The classic case is selling to StockX, whose European authentication centre receives goods in Veldhoven, Netherlands: the certificate proves your pairs left Germany and entered another Member State. RestocksAIO generates it automatically alongside your invoices when you run Generate Invoices for qualifying sales. The certificate lists you as supplier with your VAT ID, the platform as the EU customer with its VAT ID, the quantity and commercial description, the place and month of entry, plus an itemised attachment with order IDs, SKUs, sizes, delivery dates, ship-from/ship-to countries and tracking numbers.

Generating the right kind of invoice matters as much as the VAT mode. RestocksAIO offers several, available depending on the site: Summary merges sales into one invoice; SummaryByCashout generates one invoice per cashout (StockX/Alias); SummaryByVatRates separates B2B and VAT sales (Alias); Individual writes one invoice per sale; and Simplified rolls everything into a single summed line. You can also generate from a date range, from a marketplace Sale History CSV, or from a custom template.

Finished invoices don't have to stay in the app. They push straight into LexOffice, SevDesk, Fakturownia or Infakt, so the document generated from the sale lands in the tool your accountant already works in. To be clear about the boundary: RestocksAIO generates VAT-aware invoices and entry certificates and pushes them downstream — it does not file your VAT return. Filing and advice stay with your accountant or accounting software.

Selling B2B zero-rated isn't automatic — each marketplace has its own onboarding step, and getting it wrong means VAT gets charged when it shouldn't, or your invoices get rejected. The mechanics change over time, so confirm each from the platform itself, but the shape is consistent enough to plan around.

On StockX, you add your VAT ID in the regulatory settings of your account; once it's recognised you generally don't need to send StockX your invoices. On Alias, you send your seller User ID and VAT ID to GOAT's tax team to switch the account, then send your invoices once a month — which is exactly the kind of recurring batch RestocksAIO's invoice generation is built for. On WeTheNew, you request a B2B switch through their seller contact, after which your payout treatment changes and you again send invoices monthly. The pattern is: register the VAT ID once per platform, then keep a monthly invoice cadence. Because the invoices generate from sale data, that monthly send stops being a chore and becomes a single batch run.

VAT compliance is finally a record-keeping problem: the right treatment is worthless if you can't produce the documents that back it. The advantage of generating paperwork from sale data is that the trail accumulates as you operate rather than as a year-end reconstruction. Each period you archive a consistent set: the invoices (in the right scheme and language), the entry certificates for intra-Community supplies, and the proof-of-delivery PDFs that show the goods actually moved.

Because invoices push into LexOffice, SevDesk, Fakturownia or Infakt, your accountant works from live records instead of a shoebox at the deadline, and Analytics offers CSV export when they want the raw numbers. The discipline that makes audits painless isn't heroic — it's generating the documents in the same run, keeping them together with the sale they belong to, and never letting a quarter go undocumented. Get the scheme flag and the platform setup right, generate consistently, and an audit becomes a file you hand over rather than a month you lose.

A handful of errors account for most of the VAT pain operators actually hit:

• A margin-scheme sale producing a standard-VAT invoice — fixed by setting the VAT mode on the profile/controller once, not per document.
• An entry certificate whose figures don't match the invoice — avoided by generating both together from the same data.
• Missing pending sales across a quarter boundary — generate across two quarters and tick "Import old CSV to remove dupe", importing the prior quarter's CSV, so only the genuinely new sales appear.
• Trying to invoice Alias without cashouts — Alias invoicing reads cashouts to derive the EUR rate, so a period with no cashouts can't be invoiced in EUR (use Alias USD Only if you need USD).

Worked example. You buy a pair privately for €120 with no reclaimable VAT, and sell it for €180 under the margin scheme. VAT is due on the €60 margin, not on the full €180 — so at a 19% rate the VAT element is roughly €9.58, leaving your margin-scheme position far healthier than if standard VAT applied to the whole €180. The invoice shows the margin-scheme note rather than a separate deductible VAT line. Get the scheme flag wrong and that same sale would wrongly show VAT on €180 — the kind of error that's invisible until an accountant or auditor finds a quarter's worth of them. (Figures illustrative; confirm rates and treatment with your accountant.)