Pan-EU vs CEE: which VAT registrations each Amazon programme triggers

The one rule that decides everything

Every Amazon fulfilment programme is, underneath, a decision about where your stock sits. And storage is the trigger. Amazon requires a VAT number for every country where your goods are stored — that is official Seller Central guidance, and there is no way around it. Enable storage in a country, and you need that country's VAT number.

The second half of the rule comes from the countries themselves. A VAT number is not a certificate you frame and forget — local law attaches filing obligations to it. In the Czech Republic, for example, a registered business files a monthly VAT return, a control statement, and — where relevant — an EC sales list, all by the 25th of the following month.

And no, OSS does not rescue you here. The One-Stop-Shop covers cross-border B2C distance sales within the EU. It does not cover what storage creates: local supplies and movements of your own stock. If Amazon holds your goods in Poland or Czechia, you need a local registration there — OSS or not. Full explanation: why OSS doesn't cover storage.

Pan-EU: what it actually requires

Pan-EU FBA lets Amazon spread your inventory across the base countries you enable. The entry conditions:

• + Base storage in at least 2 of five countries: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland. You choose which. Every one you enable is a country where your goods will physically sit — so every one needs a VAT registration.
• + Since 25 June 2025: active listings on Amazon.nl. Note the word listings. Offers being live on the Dutch marketplace is not the same as goods being stored in the Netherlands. NL storage is a separate switch — and it is storage, not listings, that triggers a registration.

Notice what is missing from that list: the Czech Republic. CZ is not part of the Pan-EU base storage set at all. If you have Czech VAT obligations, they came in through a different door.

CEE: the discount that adds two countries

That other door is the CEE programme (Central-East Europe). Opt in, and Amazon stores your stock across Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic; in exchange you get a per-unit discount on fulfilment fees. This is how Czechia quietly enters the picture — not as a market you chose to expand into, but as a warehouse discount you accepted.

The consequences follow immediately from the one rule. Storage in Poland and Czechia means Amazon requires Polish and Czech VAT numbers. And on the Czech side the local law is blunt: a non-resident business with no seat or establishment in CZ that stores goods in a Czech warehouse must register for Czech VAT — there is no registration threshold for non-established businesses. The obligation starts from the first taxable activity, which includes moving your own stock into a Czech warehouse for sale. If PRG is showing up in your inventory reports, that is Prague — your stock is already there. More on that scenario: Amazon stores my stock in the Czech Republic — now what?

Programme by programme: the registration map

Here is the whole comparison in one table. "Typically triggered" because the real obligation follows where stock physically moved — which your inventory reports show warehouse by warehouse.

Your home-country registration (or your OSS registration for distance sales) sits on top of all of this — the table shows only what the programmes' storage footprint adds.

The non-EU wrinkle: fiscal representatives

If your business is established outside the EU — UK, Hong Kong, China, Turkey — the same programme can cost you very differently than it costs an EU seller, because some countries will not register you directly. They require a fiscal representative: a local firm that carries joint liability for your VAT and often has to post bank guarantees. Reputable representatives price that risk in, which makes those registrations markedly more expensive to obtain and to keep.

• + Direct registration possible (no fiscal rep): Germany, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Sweden.
• + Depends who you are: France (UK sellers exempt via a mutual-assistance agreement; most others need a rep) and Poland (UK and Norway exempt; HK, Turkish and Chinese sellers need one).
• + Fiscal rep required, no UK exemption: Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal — joint liability and, often, bank guarantees.

Now read that against the programmes. Full Pan-EU includes Italy and Spain — fiscal-representative territory for every non-EU seller, UK included. CEE, by contrast, is Germany, Poland and Czechia: for a UK seller, that is entirely direct-registration territory. For a Chinese or Hong Kong seller, Poland alone requires a representative. Same programme, same warehouses — a very different compliance bill depending on where your company sits.

So is CEE worth it?

Honest answer: it depends on your volume, and you should do the arithmetic before ticking the box — or right now, if the box is already ticked. The per-unit fulfilment discount is real. But compared with keeping stock in Germany alone, CEE adds two extra registrations — Poland and the Czech Republic — and with them two more sets of periodic filings, two more tax offices to correspond with, and two more deadlines that do not care how busy Q4 is.

At serious volume, a per-unit discount multiplied across thousands of units comfortably outruns fixed compliance costs. At low volume, it may not. The mistake is not choosing CEE — it is choosing CEE without pricing the compliance in. For scale: Veritax handles Czech monthly VAT compliance from €150/mo all-in — return, control statement, EC sales list, tax-office correspondence — prepared with a licensed Czech tax advisor in the loop.