Vietnam plans to impose import tax, Chinese sellers suffer heavy losses
Sunny Worldwide LogisticsIt is a logistics company with more than 20 years of transportation experience, focusing on markets such as Europe, America, Canada, Australia, Southeast Asia, etc., and is more than the owner of the cargo owner.
VCCI believes that tax exemption for imported goods worth 1 million Vietnamese dong (about 280 yuan) or below is not appropriate. It should consider implementing a comprehensive import tax policy and not exempt or reduce taxes on imported e-commerce products, because the amount of most e-commerce orders is low, generally not exceeding 1 million Vietnamese dong.
Previously, Vietnam stipulated that imported goods worth less than 1 million Vietnamese dong (approximately RMB 278) will enjoy tax-free preferential treatment without the need to impose import tax and value-added tax (VAT), aiming to promote the development of import trade.
However, policy tightened at the beginning of this year. From February 18, the VAT exemption for shipping imported goods worth less than 1 million Vietnamese dong by express delivery method will be exempted from the VAT for express delivery.Officially stopped,However, the Ministry of Finance still recommends that goods with smaller value (VND1 million or less) be exempted from import tax in the "Draft Regulations on the Administration of Import and Export Goods".
Statistics show that in 2024, more than 324 million imported goods entered Vietnam through Shopee, with an average value of only VND 43,682 per product.
Metric's report shows that in the first quarter of 2025 alone, Vietnamese consumers ordered more than 80 million items from international sellers through the Shopee platform, and each item on the platform is worth less than US. If the duty-free threshold of 1 million Vietnamese dong is adopted, almost all of these goods will not be subject to import tax.
According to a report by the e-commerce data platform Metric, there are currently about 4 million to 5 million small order packages per day through the e-commerce platformShipping from China to Vietnam.Among them, goods below 200,000 Vietnamese dong (about 57.8 yuan) account for more than half of the sales of the entire Vietnamese e-commerce market.
However, formulating tax policies for importing e-commerce goods faces many challenges, one of which is the difficulty of HS encoding and classification of e-commerce goods.
Each e-commerce shipment usually consists of many small orders, each order contains many products, and the product codes are large and diverse, which may make it difficult to determine the large-scale HS code, resulting in delivery delays and even order cancellations, causing losses to sellers and e-commerce platforms.
To solve this problem, VCCI recommends drawing on international experience to simplify the tax rate table for e-commerce goods. For example, HS codes can be grouped into certain "commodity categories" based on industry groups or purposes, with "each category" corresponding to a specific tax rate.
For example, classification one includes clothing, footwear, textiles, and bedding; classification two includes computers, telephones, headphones and other electronic devices. Canada has adopted this form since 2012, using three alternative product classification groups for nearly 5,400 HS codes.
VCCI recommends drafting agencies consider amending the import tax regulations for e-commerce goods, moving towards simplifying tax rates and applying them to all orders, regardless of value.
