Importing products as a middle man

[DEYL54]

Hi All,

I am a new member here but wanted to ask your opinion on a an issue that we are trying to get the best solution for.

The situation is that we have a ltd company in the UK & Ireland and both are VAT registered. We have a supplier who is based in the US and is shipping goods to the UK (from China). They have agreed a sale to a major retailer within the UK however this retailer does not want to take the containers of goods (or deal with importing the goods, paying duty and clearance etc..) and want everything pallatised and sent to their various distribution centres.

The problem lies that the major retailer will not deal with us as we are not a registered supplier to them and they do not want to start a new process with doing all the paperwork required for this. The supplier has asked if we can help as a middle man in helping clear the goods and doing the pallet work and shipping to the retailer as required.

If the supplier ships to us and has the commercial invoice in our company name (this can be changed if required) we would pay VAT and Duty upon import however if we shipped the goods within the UK we would have to charge VAT as well and of course we can't charge the VAT back to the UK retailer as we are not invoicing them and we can't charge the US supplier as they are not VAT registered (in this instance the supplier would be charging the retailer directly in USD).

I have looked at possible ways to act as an agent as well but I am not getting a clear response on this matter and wondering if anyone could help.

Any help would be much appreciated as we need a way of claiming back import VAT (or not paying it as an agent) without charging the VAT to anyone when the goods are moved in the UK. We can accept paying duty on the product and of course the output or sale of the goods to the end customer would mean that the HMRC would recover the right amount of VAT on the sales anyway.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.