If you are established in Spain and sell to consumers in other European Union countries, a good part of your Amazon VAT report is OSS sales. And OSS is not a total: it is a breakdown. The return does not ask how much you sold in the EU, it asks how much you sold to each country and at what rate.
This guide explains which rows of the report are OSS, how they split by country of destination, what happens with refunds, and what looks a great deal like OSS without being it.
What OSS is, told for someone who sells
The One-Stop Shop — OSS — is the scheme that lets you declare in a single place your sales to consumers in other EU countries, instead of registering in every country you sell to.
That is the idea, and for reading the report it is all you need: everything from here on stands on its own.
How OSS sales look inside the report
It all comes from the VAT transactions report, which is the source. Each row carries what you need to place it:
- Where the shipment leaves from. The country of dispatch, which is not always Spain: if you hold stock on the pan-European programme, there are sales leaving from Italy or from Germany.
- Where it goes. The country of destination, which is the one that governs the OSS split country by country.
- At what rate. The row's rate, which is the one to use — not the one you assume applies to that country.
That last point has a trap of its own, already told: a row's rate is not always the general rate of the country of destination, because there are reduced rates, and there are rows where the rate on the items and the rate on the shipping differ. When that happens neither of the two describes the whole row, and what counts is the effective rate, worked out from that row's own base and VAT.
The origin–destination pair is what turns a row into one thing or another. A sale leaving Spain for a French consumer and one leaving France for that same French consumer are not the same operation, even if the buyer notices no difference.
Country by country, and why it does not all add up to one number
Here is the difference between having the data and having the return.
OSS sales are not aggregated into a European total. They split by destination, and within each destination by rate. That is why the summary does not show one "EU sales" line, but a block for each pair of countries involved — one per destination appearing in your month.
Those blocks are named in Spanish, because the reader's own interface is: you will see "Ventas OSS desde España a Francia" and "Ventas OSS desde España a Italia" — OSS sales from Spain to France, and to Italy.
That the origin is part of the block's name is not decoration. If you sell from more than one country, two blocks with the same destination and a different origin are two different things, and collapsing them would lose exactly what has to be declared separately.
OSS refunds, in their own block
A refund of an OSS sale to Portugal is not "a refund" and nothing more: it is an OSS refund to Portugal, and it goes in its own block, with its country and its rate.
That is why refunds are classified just like sales and only afterwards is the sign looked at: first it is decided what the operation was — to which country, at which rate, from where — and then that it is a refund of that. The other way round loses the destination, and a refund with no country is a figure that cannot be carried anywhere.
What is not OSS even though it looks like it
This is the part that costs the most, because it is all sales to the EU and it is all in the same file. The report tells these cases apart before it gets to OSS:
- Domestic sales. They leave from and arrive in the same country. They are not OSS however much that country is in the EU.
- Exempt intra-Community supplies, where the buyer provides a VAT number (NIF-IVA) and the row goes at a zero rate. They are not sales to a consumer, and that is why they are not OSS.
- Exports outside the EU, and those to the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, which come out in their own block.
- VAT collected by the marketplace (deemed supplier), where Amazon remits the VAT and not you. It is in your report, but it is not yours to declare.
- Amazon's fees, which are not sales of any kind: they are a cost, and they have a guide of their own.
And a row that fits none of those cases is not forced into OSS: it stays unclassified and in plain sight — the reader labels that block "SIN CLASIFICAR". Making the numbers add up by hiding rows is the fastest way to end up with a return that looks tidy and is wrong.
How the reader handles it
If you upload the CSV to our free VAT reader, the OSS breakdown comes ready made:
- One block per country of destination, with its origin in the name, and never one aggregated European total.
- OSS refunds kept separate from sales, keeping country and rate.
- The effective rate when the rate on the items and the rate on the shipping do not match, instead of picking one of the two.
- A warning if you dispatch from a country where you are not on record as established, which may point to a registration still pending.
- A warning if there are intra-Community supplies without the buyer's VAT number.
- The rows that fit nowhere, visible and unclassified, rather than shared out by eye.
- Each block in its own currency, never mixed.
It is free and needs no sign-up to see the summary on screen, and the file never leaves your computer.
And how far this guide goes
Everything above is reading: which row goes to which country, at which rate, from where, and what is not OSS even though it looks like it. That can be checked against the report itself, which is why it is written here.
What is not reading but tax judgement — how each block is declared, and which obligations fall on you depending on where and how much you sell — is your tax adviser's work, with your case in front of them. A report properly split by country is the best starting point you can hand them; it is not a substitute for their review.