Excise goods

The rule

Goods subject to EU harmonized excise duties — in practice alcohol and tobacco products — are excluded from IOSS entirely. There is no threshold and no workaround: a EUR 12 bottle of wine can no more go through IOSS than a EUR 12,000 one. Excise-goods consignments follow the normal import process, with VAT and excise duty collected at the border.

One excise item blocks the whole consignment

The exclusion is per consignment, not per line. IOSS cannot be used even when low-value ordinary goods are shipped together with excise goods — a cart with nine t-shirts and one bottle of gin is, in its entirety, outside IOSS. The plugin implements exactly this: if any product in the cart or order is flagged as excise, the whole consignment is excluded, no destination VAT is charged, and the customer sees the import-VAT-on-delivery notice.

If you sell excise goods alongside ordinary ones and want the ordinary goods to keep their IOSS treatment, they need to be separate orders (and therefore separate consignments) — the plugin will not split a mixed cart for you.

The per-product flag

Each product’s edit screen has an Excise goods checkbox. Check it for anything subject to harmonized excise duty:

Alcohol — beer, wine, spirits, and other alcoholic beverages, at any value.
Tobacco — cigarettes, cigars, rolling and pipe tobacco, and manufactured tobacco products.

The flag works on variable products too — flag the parent and every variation is covered.

What is not excise

The common trap is over-flagging. In particular:

Perfume and toilet water are NOT excise goods and ARE allowed under IOSS. They are excluded from a separate customs relief, which causes endless confusion, but the EU’s own guidance is explicit that the import scheme covers them. Do not flag perfume.
Cosmetics, candles, food, supplements, vapes without nicotine-liquid classification issues in your destination markets, and everything else you probably sell are not harmonized-excise goods.

If you genuinely are unsure whether a product falls under harmonized excise duty (some energy products and some nicotine products sit near the line, and member states can have national excise duties beyond the harmonized set), that is a classification question for your tax advisor — the checkbox just records the answer.

What you see

Orders excluded for excise show the excise exclusion reason in the orders-list IOSS column and the order meta box, and count among the excluded orders on the dashboard. They never enter your monthly figures.

Getting it wrong, both ways

Flag missing: an excise consignment goes through IOSS that legally cannot — VAT charged at checkout that customs will not honor, a customs problem at the border, and a return line that should not exist.
Flag wrongly set: an eligible consignment is excluded, your customer pays import VAT plus a carrier fee on delivery for no reason, and you likely lose the customer.

A quick audit of the flag across your catalog when you set the plugin up is time well spent.