An online shop run from Luxembourg is an ordinary commercial business with a website attached.
It needs a business permit costing €50 in chancellery duty and taking up to 3 months, VAT registration within 15 days of starting a taxable activity, Luxembourg VAT at 17% on domestic sales, the customer's own national rate once EU consumer sales pass €10,000 a year, and a withdrawal right of 14 calendar days for most consumer sales, though not all of them — some categories are excluded, and the trader has to say so up front.
The rest of this page is the detail behind those five numbers, and the checklist at the end is the order to do them in.
Each figure below carries its own official source on the claim it supports — the business-permit conditions from guichet.lu, the VAT rates from the Administration de l'enregistrement, des domaines et de la TVA. The VAT percentages are the national rates in force in 2026.
The base layer: a company, a permit, a real address
Selling goods online is commercial activity, so nothing about the storefront being a website removes a single formality. On qualifications the law is short: none — no professional qualification is required for commercial activities that are not otherwise regulated.
The full set the Ministry of the Economy examines is professional integrity, professional qualification in line with the planned activity, establishment in Luxembourg, effective and permanent management of the business by the permit holder, and compliance with tax and business obligations.
"Establishment in Luxembourg" is the condition webshop founders underestimate, because a website feels placeless. The law asks for an appropriate physical installation, adapted to the nature and the scale of the activities carried on. On the human side, the manager must ensure day-to-day management of the business effectively and permanently, through a physical presence at the establishment.
A mail-forwarding address plus a director who flies in twice a year satisfies neither. A Luxembourg company needs its registered office at an address in Luxembourg, and that address has to match what the business genuinely does there.
The sequencing is where files stall. An application is acknowledged within 15 days, but the acknowledgement is not the permit, and the articles of association must be registered with the Trade and Companies Register before the permit is definitively granted.
So the company has to exist on paper before the permit can land. A Sàrl-S is formed by a private deed — a notarised document is not required. The articles then have to be filed with the Trade and Companies Register within 1 month of signature.
Silence from the Ministry is not fatal: the absence of a ministerial reply before the end of the 3-month period counts as a tacit authorisation.
It still leaves you without a permit number to print, and that number has to appear on the shop itself — the 2D barcode assigned to each business permit must appear on letters, emails, websites, quotations, invoices and the shop front of every point of sale, as well as on the signs that must be installed at all construction sites.
The law accepts either the ministerial permit number or the two-dimensional barcode, so the footer of the homepage and the order confirmation are the two places to check before launch.
VAT: what you charge, and where you declare it
Domestic sales are the easy case and stop being the whole story the moment a parcel crosses a border. The variable is not where your company sits but where the buyer sits, and how much you have already shipped to consumers across the EU this year.
| Where the buyer is | VAT you charge | Where you declare it |
|---|---|---|
| Luxembourg consumer | Luxembourg rates: 17% standard, 14%, 8% or 3% by product | ordinary Luxembourg VAT return |
| EU consumer, EU-wide distance sales up to €10,000 a year | Luxembourg rates | ordinary Luxembourg VAT return |
| EU consumer, once you pass €10,000 | the destination country's rate | One-Stop-Shop, or a VAT registration per country |
The €10,000 line is annual, VAT-exclusive and EU-wide — not one allowance per country, which is the distinction that decides whether your listed prices are right. Cross it and the VAT belongs to the destination country, as guichet sets out on its supplies of goods page. The One-Stop-Shop exists so that the consequence is one Luxembourg filing rather than a registration in every Member State you ship to.
A second €10,000 threshold appears in the same rulebook and is a different rule: it is the annual, VAT-exclusive limit on intra-Community acquisitions of goods, and it applies to non-taxable legal persons buying from other Member States. Identical number, different question.
Registration itself is due within 15 days of starting a taxable activity, and the registration mechanics are the same as for any commercial company. The initial declaration asks for a copy of the incorporation deed in French or German, plus a copy of the identity card or passport of the named partners appearing in the deed and/or of the company's managers and directors.
A small shop can stay outside the system under the franchise regime, which covers annual turnover up to €50,000 with a tolerance to €55,000; franchise businesses still report before 1 March each year, declaring the turnover achieved in the previous calendar year.
Once you are registered, turnover sets the rhythm: annual filing can suffice below €112,000, monthly filing applies above €620,000, and for monthly and quarterly filers the deadline is fixed — monthly / quarterly returns due before the 15th of the month following the period, filed electronically via eCDF.
A shop under €500,000 of annual turnover may also opt to account for VAT on receipts rather than on sales, which matters when marketplaces pay out on a delay.
Build the rate logic before the growth, not after it. Retrofitting destination-country rates across a year of mixed sales means re-deriving the VAT on every order that already shipped; the shop software is rarely the hard part, the accounting reconstruction is.
Where the goods physically sit
A garage of stock in Luxembourg, a 3PL warehouse in Belgium and a dropship supplier three time zones away are three different VAT and customs situations wearing the same storefront.
Luxembourg's own rule for sellers based elsewhere shows the shape of the question you have to ask about each of them: In general, any person not established or domiciled in Luxembourg who carries out supplies of goods or services whose place of taxation is deemed to be in Luxembourg must register for Luxembourg VAT — except businesses declaring those receipts under the One-Stop-Shop (OSS) regime.
The mirror of that — what the country holding your pallets asks of a Luxembourg company — is a question for that country's tax authority, and it is much cheaper asked before the 3PL contract is signed than after the first quarter's orders have shipped.
Imports for resale add customs and import VAT on top, and selling through a marketplace can move VAT collection to the platform in defined cases. Both are separate regimes with their own conditions, and neither is settled by your Luxembourg registration alone.
Consumer rules a webshop cannot contract around
Distance-selling law applies to consumer sales concluded without the parties meeting, which is every order a webshop takes. It is not decoration on the terms page: it dictates what has to be visible before the buyer clicks, and what happens to the money afterwards.
Before the order is placed, the shop must give the consumer the trader's identity, telephone number and business address; the essential characteristics of the goods or service; the price inclusive of all taxes; any additional transport, delivery or postage costs; the date by which the trader undertakes to deliver the goods or perform the services; the payment, delivery or performance arrangements; the existence of a right of withdrawal and, where applicable, that the cost of returning the goods falls on the consumer; where there is no right of withdrawal, that the consumer will not have that right; a reminder of the legal guarantee of conformity for goods; information on any after-sales service or after-sales assistance and commercial guarantees; the conditions for terminating the contract where it is of indefinite duration or automatically renewed; and the existence of a deposit or other financial guarantees.
The withdrawal right runs for 14 calendar days as the statutory minimum.
A shop that never mentions it does not quietly escape it: where the trader failed to inform the consumer of the right, the window becomes 12 months, running from the date the initial 14-day period would have expired — but if the trader supplies the withdrawal information at any point during those 12 months, the period is reduced to 14 days starting from the date that information is received.
Once a consumer withdraws, you have 14 days counted from the day after you are told, and the refund must use the same means of payment as the original transaction and cover the sums paid by the consumer, including delivery charges where applicable. Guichet's distance selling to consumers page carries both.
Two practical consequences follow. First, whether the cost of returning the goods falls on the consumer is itself one of the items on that list, so it has to be stated on the buying path and not buried in the terms.
Second, payment and marketplace onboarding reviews read the same pages a regulator would, so a thin legal footer usually surfaces as an onboarding delay long before it surfaces as a complaint. On the paperwork side, a consumer invoice must be issued within the month in which the customer receives the goods, the works are completed or the service is performed, and invoices and accounting records are kept for 10 years, in Luxembourg.
Funding the digital build
Shop replatforming, logistics digitalisation and cybersecurity hardening sit inside the SME Packages Digital scheme: eligible project costs run €3,000–25,000 excluding VAT, reimbursed at up to 70%. A Fit 4 Digital assessment, which writes the roadmap first, is fixed at €5,000 and covered in full by a grant of the same amount. Both are worth checking before the build is commissioned rather than after, so the application belongs ahead of the platform invoice rather than after it.
Common questions
Three follow-ups come straight out of the rules above, and each has a number attached rather than a judgement call.
Does an online shop need a business permit?
Yes. Selling goods is commercial activity whether the counter is physical or digital. The chancellery duty is €50 and the decision comes within 3 months. On the qualification side the answer is none — no professional qualification is required for commercial activities that are not otherwise regulated.
When do I have to register for VAT?
Within 15 days of starting a taxable activity. Below €50,000 of annual turnover the franchise regime is available, with a tolerance to €55,000, and the annual report is still due before 1 March each year, declaring the turnover achieved in the previous calendar year.
What changes when EU consumer sales pass €10,000?
VAT stops being Luxembourg's and becomes the destination country's, at that country's rate, on every subsequent B2C sale into the EU. The One-Stop-Shop lets you declare all of it through a single Luxembourg filing instead of registering in each Member State separately.
Pre-launch compliance checklist
Run these in order rather than in parallel. Steps 1 and 2 are sequential by law, step 3 needs the deed produced in step 1, and step 8 stops being available the moment you commission the platform build. Each one ends in something you can tick off the same week.
- Incorporate, then file. Form the company (a Sàrl-S is formed by a private deed — a notarised document is not required) and file the articles with the RCS within 1 month of signature, because the permit cannot be definitively granted before that registration exists.
- Apply for the business permit. Pay the €50 chancellery duty, expect the acknowledgement within 15 days, and plan the launch date around a decision window of up to 3 months.
- Register for VAT within 15 days. Scan the documents the initial declaration asks for before you open it: a copy of the incorporation deed in French or German, plus a copy of the identity card or passport of the named partners appearing in the deed and/or of the company's managers and directors.
- Configure the tax engine twice. Load the Luxembourg rates (17%, 14%, 8%, 3%) against the product catalogue, and have the destination-rate table and OSS reporting ready before the €10,000 crossing rather than after it.
- Publish the pre-contract information on the buying path. Identity, all-taxes-included price, delivery costs, delivery date and the withdrawal terms — 14 days, refund within 14 days by the original means of payment.
- Put the permit identifier on the site. Homepage or footer, plus order confirmations and invoices, using either the ministerial permit number or the two-dimensional barcode.
- Decide the stock location on paper. Write down which country will hold inventory, and clear its registration position with that country's authority before signing the warehouse contract.
- File the funding application before the build. Aid schemes generally turn on whether the project has already begun, so check the current condition on the scheme page before you commission the build rather than after.