{"id":2122571,"date":"2026-09-16T14:54:32","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T12:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kohenavocats.fr\/2026\/09\/16\/foreign-seller-france-vat-number-oss-fix-errors-abroad\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T14:54:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T12:54:32","slug":"foreign-seller-france-vat-number-oss-fix-errors-abroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kohenavocats.fr\/en\/2026\/09\/16\/foreign-seller-france-vat-number-oss-fix-errors-abroad\/","title":{"rendered":"Selling to France Without a French Company: French VAT Numbers, the OSS Shortcut and Fixing Errors From Abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"

You run a company in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore and you sell to customers in France. Perhaps you ship goods from a warehouse abroad, perhaps you sell online to French consumers through your own website or a marketplace, perhaps you perform services for French clients without ever opening a French office. No French subsidiary exists, no Kbis was ever issued, that Kbis being the company identity certificate delivered by the greffe, the registry office of the French commercial court, when a company is entered in the RCS, the Registre du commerce et des societes, the French Trade and Companies Register. Yet one morning the French tax administration, the DGFIP, the Direction generale des finances publiques, writes to you, or your parcels start getting stopped, or your accountant warns you that French value added tax should have been charged from the first sale. Many foreign sellers discover at that moment that France can tax sales made by a company that has no French establishment at all, and that the question was never whether you have a French company but where France considers your sale to take place, who France treats as liable for the tax, and whether you registered through the right door. This article answers those three questions in order. It explains when a foreign seller needs a French VAT number and when the European one-stop shop, the OSS, spares you that step, how registration, returns and invoices work from abroad, and what happens when the paperwork goes wrong, illustrated by a February 2026 ruling of the French Supreme Court quashing a 1.9-million-euro import VAT recovery because customs representation had simply been presumed. It completes our general guide for foreign founders on setting up a company in France, from bank account and Kbis to VAT and first hire<\/a>, and it goes further than our companion piece on the appointment, liability and replacement of a fiscal representative<\/a>, which covers the representative mechanism itself.<\/p>\n

I. Selling to France without a French company: do I need a French VAT number or does the OSS cover me?<\/h2>\n

A. Where France says your sale happens: goods in France, distance sales and services to French customers<\/h3>\n

French VAT starts from a deliberately wide net. The article 256 of the General Tax Code<\/a> makes supplies of goods and services for consideration by a taxable person acting as such subject to VAT when they take place in France, whatever the nationality or residence of the seller. Your company can therefore be fully American, British, Emirati or Singaporean, with no SIREN, that SIREN being the nine-digit identification number issued by INSEE when a French business is registered, no SIRET, its fourteen-digit establishment-level extension, and no French address, and still carry out transactions that France taxes. Everything then turns on the place-of-supply rules, the localisation rules that decide whether a given sale is treated as happening in France.<\/p>\n

For goods, the rule is physical and easy to picture. The article 258 of the General Tax Code<\/a> provides: “Le lieu de livraison de biens meubles corporels est r\u00e9put\u00e9 se situer en France lorsque le bien se trouve en France”, meaning the place of supply of movable tangible goods is deemed to be in France when the goods are in France, and it lists the decisive moments, including: “Au moment de l’exp\u00e9dition ou du transport par le vendeur, par l’acqu\u00e9reur, ou pour leur compte, \u00e0 destination de l’acqu\u00e9reur”, the moment of dispatch or transport by the seller, the buyer or on their behalf to the buyer, as well as installation by the seller and the simple making available to the buyer where nothing is shipped. In practice, goods stored in a French warehouse, goods installed in France by the seller, and goods shipped from abroad to a French buyer can all fall inside French VAT, each through a different sub-rule of the same article. The official tax commentary confirms the point for outsiders: non-established taxable persons remain liable in particular for supplies of goods whose place is located in France, including supplies falling under the distance-sales regime whose place is in France, as the BOI-TVA-CHAMP-20-70 of 11 February 2026<\/a> explains.<\/p>\n

Distance sales deserve a paragraph of their own because they are the daily reality of foreign e-commerce. When a seller established in one European Union country sells goods online to private consumers in another, the sale is taxed at destination once the seller exceeds a single Union-wide annual threshold of 10,000 euros of intra-Community distance sales and sales of electronic services combined. Below the threshold, a small seller may still tax at origin, but above it French VAT at French rates applies to sales to French consumers, and registration for that purpose becomes unavoidable in one form or another. Goods arriving from outside the Union follow a parallel logic at the border: import VAT is due when the goods enter France, and the low-value consignment reliefs of the past have been replaced by systems that push the VAT charge onto the seller, the marketplace or the importer of record. Sellers who assumed that shipping from abroad keeps them outside French tax are therefore the most exposed: the goods cross the border, the place of supply is France, and somebody owes the tax.<\/p>\n

Services obey a different compass. The article 259 of the General Tax Code<\/a> places business-to-business services where the customer is established, so services supplied to a French taxable customer are generally located in France, while business-to-consumer services follow a mosaic of special rules depending on the nature of the service, from electronically supplied services to services connected with immovable property, which are taxed where the property sits. A foreign consultancy, software studio or agency working remotely for French clients can therefore make French-located supplies without moving anyone to Paris. The good news, developed below, is that many such business-to-business services fall under reverse charge, so the French customer accounts for the tax and the foreign provider may not need to register at all. The bad news is that the boundary between a service covered by reverse charge and a supply requiring registration is technical, and getting it wrong means either missing returns or charging VAT you should not have charged.<\/p>\n

Two timing rules complete the picture and surprise many newcomers. The article 269 of the General Tax Code<\/a> states: “Le fait g\u00e9n\u00e9rateur de la taxe se produit : a) Au moment o\u00f9 la livraison, l’acquisition intracommunautaire du bien ou la prestation de services est effectu\u00e9”, the chargeable event occurs when the supply, the intra-Community acquisition or the service is carried out, and the official commentary draws the consequence: for supplies of goods, the chargeable event occurs upon delivery and the tax becomes chargeable at that same moment, per the BOI-TVA-BASE-20-10<\/a>. For goods, delivery and chargeability therefore coincide in the standard case, and any advance payment received beforehand triggers chargeability immediately up to the amount collected. A foreign seller who waits for the end-of-quarter reconciliation before thinking about VAT is already late by operation of law.<\/p>\n

B. The OSS shortcut, the marketplace rule and the imports you cannot route through the OSS<\/h3>\n

Once you accept that some of your sales are located in France, the next question is through which door you declare them. The European Union created one-stop shops precisely so that a seller does not have to register in every consumer country: the Union OSS lets a seller established in one Member State declare distance sales and certain services to consumers across the Union through a single return filed at home, with the tax then redistributed to France for the French share. A British, American or Asian seller with an EU subsidiary or EU fixed establishment can often channel its European consumer sales through the OSS of that establishment State and avoid a French VAT number for those flows. The OSS return, the redistribution and the record-keeping sit in the establishment State, while France receives the money without ever issuing you a French number. For sellers whose only French exposure is business-to-consumer distance sales inside the Union, the OSS is normally the cheapest compliant route, and a direct French registration for the same sales would be duplication, not diligence.<\/p>\n

Marketplaces add a second shortcut that many sellers misunderstand. Where goods are sold through an electronic interface that becomes the deemed supplier, the marketplace itself accounts for the VAT on the sale to the final customer, with the chargeable event and chargeability occurring when the final customer payment is accepted, the administration recalling in this respect articles 269(1)(a sexies), 269(2)(b) and 298 sexdecies H of the Tax Code, per the BOI-TVA-BASE-20-40<\/a>. The underlying seller still owes accurate data to the platform, stock records and, where it also sells directly, its own declarations, but the VAT on the marketplace leg is the platform’s problem. Sellers who both sell through a marketplace and through their own site must therefore run two tracks: platform sales covered by the deemed-supplier rule, and direct sales declared through the OSS or a French registration. Treating the marketplace as a blanket exemption for the whole business is one of the most frequent and most expensive errors advisers see.<\/p>\n

The OSS has hard limits, and three of them matter constantly. First, the OSS does not cover goods that are stocked in France: once your inventory sits in a French fulfilment warehouse, your domestic French sales and your transfers of own stock are French operations that require French identification, OSS or no OSS. Second, the OSS does not collect import VAT: goods imported into France from outside the Union need an importer of record, a customs declarant and, where due, payment or deferment of the import VAT, which is a customs operation before it is a VAT return operation. Third, the reverse-charge mechanism for business-to-business services and the refund mechanism for VAT suffered in France without French operations run on separate tracks, described below. The practical test is therefore simple to state and worth applying sale by sale: sales located in France that are neither OSS-eligible consumer sales declared at home, nor marketplace sales accounted for by the platform, nor reverse-charge services accounted for by the French customer, need a French VAT number and French returns. Everything else in this article flows from that sorting exercise, and sellers who document it product by product rarely go wrong.<\/p>\n

II. Registered, reporting and under control: how a foreign seller runs French VAT from abroad and fixes mistakes<\/h2>\n

A. Getting the number, filing the returns and issuing valid invoices without a French office<\/h3>\n

Registration comes first and the deadline is short. The article 286 of the General Tax Code<\/a> requires every taxable person to register, and the administration reads it strictly: “Dans les quinze jours du commencement de ses op\u00e9rations, souscrire au bureau d\u00e9sign\u00e9 par un arr\u00eat\u00e9 une d\u00e9claration conforme au mod\u00e8le fourni par l’administration”, within fifteen days of starting operations, file the prescribed declaration with the designated office. For a foreign seller that moment is the first French-located taxable sale, not the incorporation of a French company you may never create, and the competent office is the foreign-business tax service of the DGFIP, the SIE, the Service des impots des entreprises, specialised unit for non-resident businesses, which issues the individual French VAT number, a FR-prefixed identifier distinct from any number you hold at home. Waiting until the tax office writes to you means the fifteen days have long expired, and every invoice issued in the meantime without a valid number or with the wrong VAT treatment becomes a correction project.<\/p>\n

Who files for you depends on where your business is established, and the dividing line runs between the Union and the rest of the world. The administration states the non-EU rule bluntly: under article 289 A of the Tax Code, taxable persons not established in the European Union must appoint a fiscal representative who undertakes to complete their VAT formalities, while persons established in another EU Member State with no French establishment have neither the obligation nor even the option to appoint one, and must register, declare and pay directly, with only the possibility of using an agent, a mandataire, for the errands, per the BOI-TVA-DECLA-20-30-40 of 11 February 2026<\/a>. An American, British post-Brexit, Emirati or Singaporean seller therefore cannot simply file from headquarters: it needs a French-established fiscal representative who is jointly liable for the tax, whereas a German, Spanish or Irish seller registers directly and keeps full control. Choosing the representative is consequently a legal decision, not an administrative errand, and our companion analysis of appointment, liability and change of fiscal representative<\/a> should be read before signing any mandate.<\/p>\n

Once identified, the foreign seller joins the ordinary French return machinery. The article 287 of the General Tax Code<\/a> requires identified liable persons to file the turnover return, in practice the CA3 form for the standard real regime, showing output tax, deductible input tax and the balance, and the article 1692 of the same Code<\/a> ties payment to the return: liable persons pay the tax due when they file. Monthly or quarterly filing depends on the tax due, electronic filing and payment are mandatory, and the calendar tolerates no learning curve: a seller whose French sales start in October cannot discover the return in January and file everything then without surcharges and late interest. Sellers with only occasional French operations sometimes qualify for lighter rhythms, but the default for an active e-commerce or services flow is the regular CA3 cycle, and the fiscal representative or the appointed agent diaries it exactly like a domestic company’s returns.<\/p>\n

Liability for the tax itself follows the person who carries out the taxable supply, with one major exception that relieves many foreign service providers. The article 283 of the General Tax Code<\/a> opens with the principle: “La taxe sur la valeur ajout\u00e9e doit \u00eatre acquitt\u00e9e par les personnes qui r\u00e9alisent les op\u00e9rations imposables”, VAT must be paid by the persons carrying out the taxable transactions, then adds the business-to-business services exception: where such services are supplied by a person not established in France, the French taxable customer acting as such and holding a French VAT identification number accounts for the tax itself. A foreign agency invoicing a French company, a non-French consultant billing a Paris group, a software vendor selling to French businesses: in each case the French customer self-assesses the VAT, the foreign invoice is issued without French VAT with the customer’s number shown and the reverse-charge wording, and no French registration is needed for that flow. The mirror image is equally important: sales to French private individuals never benefit from reverse charge, so the foreign seller must charge, collect and remit.<\/p>\n

Invoices close the loop and French invoice law is stricter than many sellers expect. The article 289 of the General Tax Code<\/a> states: “Tout assujetti est tenu de s’assurer qu’une facture est \u00e9mise, par lui-m\u00eame, ou en son nom et pour son compte, par son client ou par un tiers”, every taxable person must ensure an invoice is issued, by itself or in its name and on its behalf. French invoices must show the seller’s and customer’s VAT numbers where applicable, the quantity and nature of the supplies, unit prices, the applicable rate, the tax amount per rate, the consecutive invoice number and the issue date, and since the phased rollout of electronic invoicing, large numbers of business-to-business invoices must also transit through compliant platforms with real-time reporting of the data to the administration, the e-invoicing and e-reporting reform our analysis of French e-invoicing from September 2026<\/a> describes for foreign companies. A foreign seller whose checkout generates American-style receipts without VAT numbers, sequential numbering or rate breakdowns is not issuing French invoices at all, and every missing mention carries its own fine, on top of the VAT at stake. Aligning the billing software with article 289 before the first French sale costs far less than reissuing a year of invoices under pressure.<\/p>\n

B. When the paperwork fails: a 1.9-million-euro import VAT case, presumed representatives and contesting from abroad<\/h3>\n

The sharpest warning of recent years comes from imports, where VAT meets customs law and the amounts move fast. In a dispute decided on 11 February 2026, pourvoi number 24-18.748, published in the Bulletin<\/a>, the Commercial Chamber of the Court of Cassation reviewed an assessment born of Apple-branded goods shipped from the United States to French logistics platforms. The facts found below were striking: “la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Axxez Group commercialise des produits de marque Apple qu’elle exp\u00e9die depuis les Etats-Unis \u00e0 destination de plateformes logistiques dont certaines sont situ\u00e9es en France”, and the goods had been declared on the transport documents as negligible-value consignments, obtaining an import VAT exemption they should never have had. The carrier, Federal Express International France, had transported the goods and lodged the French import declarations, and after an investigation covering December 2013 to May 2017 the customs administration notified it of false declarations of kind, value and real consignee, then issued a recovery notice, the AMR, the avis de mise en recouvrement, the enforceable collection instrument, on 25 January 2019. The contested ruling had upheld the infringement report and the recovery notice of 25 January 2019, ordering Federal Express International France to pay 1,940,162 euros.<\/p>\n

The outcome matters to every foreign seller because of the ground on which the Supreme Court quashed the Paris ruling of 17 June 2024, docket number 22\/01383<\/a>. The Court of Appeal had reasoned that since the American exporter could not itself act as customs declarant within the meaning of Union customs law, the Union-established declaring company it had used must be deemed to have acted as indirect representative, even while denying any direct or indirect authorisation. The Court of Cassation rejected that shortcut. In the words of the 11 February 2026 ruling<\/a>: “la repr\u00e9sentation en douanes doit \u00eatre expresse et ne se pr\u00e9sume pas”, customs representation must be express and is never presumed. The Court held that the appeal court, “pour s’\u00eatre fond\u00e9e sur de simples pr\u00e9somptions”, having relied on mere presumptions, had violated the applicable provisions, including point 1 of article 293 A of the General Tax Code on import VAT. The judgment was published in the Bulletin, giving it full precedential weight. Three lessons follow. First, nobody becomes your customs or fiscal representative by implication: mandates must be written, express and precisely scoped before the first declaration. Second, an American or other non-EU seller that cannot declare in its own name must organise the declaration chain consciously, designating who declares, in what capacity, and who bears the import VAT, rather than letting the carrier’s standard terms decide by default. Third, where the administration has already built an assessment on a presumed mandate, the absence of an express mandate is a substantive defence to raise, not a detail, and the FedEx ruling is the authority to cite.<\/p>\n

Domestic French VAT disputes follow a parallel enforcement rhythm that foreign sellers should understand before the first letter arrives. Controls typically begin with a request for the returns, the invoices, the contracts and the transport proofs, continue with a proposed adjustment, and crystallise in a recovery notice that must be contested within the strict time limits stated on the document, first by an administrative claim to the tax office, then before the administrative court if the claim is rejected expressly or implicitly. Two features of the French system surprise outsiders. The claim rarely suspends collection on its own, so the amounts remain payable or guaranteed while the dispute runs, and the judge reviews the tax operation by operation, which rewards the seller who kept delivery notes, Incoterms, warehouse records and the OSS returns of the establishment State. Sellers who treated France as a purely logistical stop, with goods flowing through French platforms but all VAT supposedly handled elsewhere, discover at this stage that presumptions do not help the administration, as FedEx shows, but do not help the taxpayer either: every exemption, every reverse charge, every OSS declaration must be documented. Our guide to verification, reassessment and contesting a French tax audit from abroad<\/a> walks through that procedure step by step.<\/p>\n

Correction before control remains the cheapest strategy, and French law rewards it. A seller who discovers undeclared French sales, a wrong rate, invoices without VAT where VAT was due, or marketplace sales wrongly treated as covered can file corrective returns, pay the arrears with the reduced surcharges applicable to spontaneous regularisation, and align the billing software the same week. The administration distinguishes the seller who comes forward with complete figures from the seller caught with gaps, and the difference shows in penalties and in the years reviewed. Four reflexes make regularisation credible: quantify the French-located sales month by month using the article 258 and 259 sorting test, separate the flows that genuinely belonged to the OSS, the marketplace or reverse charge with the supporting returns and mandates, file or amend the French CA3 returns with payment, and reissue or complete the invoices so the paper matches the money. Sellers who also owe registration, because the fifteen-day declaration was never filed, regularise the identification at the same time through the SIE for non-residents or through the fiscal representative for non-EU businesses, so that the past and the future sit on the same compliant footing.<\/p>\n

A final word for sellers whose French footprint centres on Paris and the Ile-de-France region. Many foreign brands start with a Paris fulfilment warehouse, a Paris showroom or Paris-based corporate customers, which concentrates the French-located sales, the warehouse stock records and the competent tax office in one region. Keep the warehouse inventory statements, the platform delivery reports for the Paris addresses and the service contracts with Paris clients in a single VAT file, in French or with French translations, so that any information request from the SIE can be answered within days rather than months. Proceedings, claims and hearings run in French and deadlines run from formal notification, not from the day the letter is opened at headquarters abroad, so give your French representative or counsel standing instructions to forward every DGFIP letter the day it arrives. Companies that diary the French return calendar alongside the OSS calendar of their establishment State, and that reconcile the two every quarter, are the ones that never need the FedEx defence, because their mandates are express, their numbers exist, and their sales were sorted before the first parcel crossed the border.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

Selling to France without a French company is lawful, common and fully taxable in the right places. The sorting exercise decides everything: goods located in France under article 258, distance sales to French consumers above the Union threshold, and services located in France under article 259 are French VAT operations even when the seller has never seen a greffe, while consumer sales properly declared through the OSS of the establishment State, marketplace sales accounted for by the deemed supplier, and business services reverse-charged by the identified French customer need no French number. Where a French number is needed, the clock runs fast, fifteen days from the first operation, through the SIE for non-residents, with an express fiscal representative for non-EU sellers and direct registration for EU sellers, followed by CA3 returns, payment with the return, and invoices that satisfy article 289 and the e-invoicing reform. The FedEx ruling of February 2026 adds the decisive warning for cross-border flows: representation, in customs as in tax, must be express and is never presumed, and a 1.9-million-euro assessment can collapse where the mandate was only assumed. A foreign seller who sorts its flows sale by sale, registers through the right door, files on time and keeps the transport and invoice proofs turns French VAT into a compliance routine. The sellers who suffer are those who assume distance means exemption: the goods are in France, the consumer is in France, the service is used in France, and the tax follows each of them.<\/p>\n

Need a quick opinion on your case<\/h2>\n

Selling to France from abroad and unsure whether you need a French VAT number, whether the OSS covers your sales, or facing a DGFIP information request or recovery notice? Our firm offers a phone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm to review your sales flows, your registration and your corrective options. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22<\/a> or write through our contact page<\/a>. Our office in Paris advises foreign sellers across Paris and Ile-de-France and from abroad in English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreign seller to France? 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