Since 1 October 2026, every consumer order Amazon delivers to an Austrian address carries a €2.40 parcel tax at checkout: Austria’s new €2 tax plus 20% VAT, charged once per order. Amazon pays it to the Austrian tax office and collects it from the buyer. You don’t have to file anything or change your prices. It covers FBA and seller-fulfilled orders shipped to Austria from Amazon.de, .fr, .it, .es and .co.uk. The cost to you is indirect. Your Austrian buyers now pay more for the same basket, and cheap single-item orders take the biggest hit.

What changed

The seller-side details come from Amazon’s own notice to sellers on the Amazon.de Seller Central forums, posted by the News_Amazon account. ORF, VOL.AT, weekend.at and mobiflip each reported the €2.40-per-order charge to customers separately.

  • Austria now taxes B2C parcels. The Parcel Tax Act took effect on 1 October 2026. It charges €2 per parcel, and the seller can opt to pay €2 per order instead. Sources: fiscal-requirements.com, Forvis Mazars.
  • Only large sellers are liable, and Amazon counts as one for marketplace sales. The tax applies to businesses whose Austrian distance sales went over €100 million the previous year. Sales made through a marketplace count as the platform’s own sales. That is why Amazon, not you, owes the tax on your orders. Sources: fiscal-requirements.com, weekend.at (citing the Austrian Handelsverband).
  • Amazon chose the per-order method. The buyer pays €2.40 (€2 plus 20% VAT) once per order, however many items or parcels are in it. Sources: Amazon, ORF, VOL.AT, weekend.at, mobiflip.
  • It applies to FBA and FBM. It covers B2C orders delivered to Austria from the Amazon stores in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK. Source: Amazon.
  • Sellers don’t need to do anything. Amazon’s notice says it pays the tax itself and that your prices stay as they are. Source: Amazon.
  • B2B orders are exempt if the buyer gives a valid EU VAT number. Source: Amazon.
  • Refunds are all-or-nothing. The buyer gets the €2.40 back if the order is cancelled before it ships or every item is returned. If they keep even one item, the tax stays. Sources: Amazon, VOL.AT.

What it means for a private-label seller

If you don’t sell to Austria, nothing changes. If you use Pan-EU FBA or sell to Austrian buyers through Amazon.de, you probably do, whether or not you think of Austria as a market.

The tax isn’t on your fee statement, but it is in your buyer’s basket. Your price and your fees stay the same. What changes is what the buyer pays at checkout. On a €12 single-item order, €2.40 is 20% on top of the basket. On a €60 order it’s 4%. If you sell low-price consumables in Austria, this is a price rise you didn’t choose.

It’s charged per order, not per item, so bigger baskets dilute it. A buyer who adds a second unit or a related product pays the €2.40 once. That gives you a better argument for multipacks, bundles and Frequently Bought Together placements on Amazon.de. Austrian buyers now have a reason to consolidate their orders.

The refund rule affects partial returns. If a buyer keeps part of an order, they don’t get the tax back. Buyers who notice may return everything rather than one item. That’s a guess about behaviour, and no data on it exists yet. If you sell sets or multi-item orders into Austria, watch your full-order return rate there.

What this doesn’t tell you. Nobody has published how much the tax is hurting conversion in Austria, and it is a week old. Amazon is implementing the tax while saying it will challenge the law’s legality, so it may not be permanent. Those are good reasons not to cut Austrian prices on reflex.

What to do about it

  1. Find out how much of your EU volume ships to Austria. Your Amazon.de order report shows the ship-to country. If it’s a rounding error, you’re done.
  2. If it’s meaningful, look at single-unit orders under €20. Those are where €2.40 changes the buyer’s maths most. Check their Austrian conversion over the next four weeks against September.
  3. Make it easier to buy more than one. Multipacks, bundles and a sensible second product cost you nothing to test, and now there’s a clear reason buyers might want them.
  4. Don’t change your Austrian prices to absorb the tax yet. You can’t absorb it directly, since Amazon adds it at checkout. A price cut would only be a guess at a conversion effect nobody has measured.

Sources