Today, I was looking for a composting toilet for a small shed I am building and came across a promising company called Trobolo. Quite pricy, but hey! we are doing something for our planet right?
After some quick checks and comparisons I came to the conclusion, that IndieBloem(R) should be my next toilet, which would set me back 689 EUR incl VAT (or 520 GBP excl VAT when ordering from the english website).
After selecting an additional liquids container, I went to the checkout page and saw a total price of 718.90 EUR incl VAT (which is a 114.78 EUR by itself):
When I was about to enter my billing and shipping address in Switzerland I was quite surprised to see what happened. The checkout did correctly recalculate and set the VAT to 0% (as this would be a shipping to non-EU country), but the net price of the goods stayed the same (689 EUR for IndoBloem and 29.90 EUR for the container).
This is actually funny, as now the seller (Trobolo) not only adds the complete burden of shipping cost (which is “free” in Germany) on the buyer (me), but also sells its goods for an additional 19% profit (nice margin by the way), as he does not have to deduct VAT upon receiving the payment; plus I have to pay the Swiss VAT/customs of 7.7% upon import of the goods into the country.
Let me think about this … for not too long. Maybe it will not be an IndiBloem after all.
Our Journey to Scotland 
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