Since Brexit fully took effect at the beginning of this year, all goods (other than correspondence) sent from the UK to any of the remaining EU/EEA countries have to be sent with a customs declaration where you have to fill in the details of the item(s) that you are sending including how much they are worth.
I would guess that technically you don't need to fill in a customs declaration for greetings cards as they count as correspondence and have no commercial value. Even so, to be on the safe side I still did so for the cards that I sent last Christmas and at Easter to my various friends in mainland Europe.
If you pay for postage online via the Royal Mail website (which I did to save having to queue up in the Post Office to buy stamps for them) you automatically get a customs form for items being sent to mainland Europe whether you need one or not.
For each card I simply put greetings card, value £1, on the form, and they all seemed to reach their destinations OK except for one Easter card that I sent to a friend in France this Easter. It came back with two labels stuck on it: one marked addressee unknown at marked address, and one saying that it had been refused by the French customs because it didn't comply with customs regulations even though I was 99.9% sure that I had filled it in correctly. It was exactly the same as all the others that I sent and none of them came back.
I'm guessing that it might just have been a case of the customs officials who processed it being over-zealous. Or they might have been on autopilot because they'd had several non-compliant items so they put one of those labels on by mistake even though it was just a case of the addressee having moved away.
I would guess that technically you don't need to fill in a customs declaration for greetings cards as they count as correspondence and have no commercial value. Even so, to be on the safe side I still did so for the cards that I sent last Christmas and at Easter to my various friends in mainland Europe.
If you pay for postage online via the Royal Mail website (which I did to save having to queue up in the Post Office to buy stamps for them) you automatically get a customs form for items being sent to mainland Europe whether you need one or not.
For each card I simply put greetings card, value £1, on the form, and they all seemed to reach their destinations OK except for one Easter card that I sent to a friend in France this Easter. It came back with two labels stuck on it: one marked addressee unknown at marked address, and one saying that it had been refused by the French customs because it didn't comply with customs regulations even though I was 99.9% sure that I had filled it in correctly. It was exactly the same as all the others that I sent and none of them came back.
I'm guessing that it might just have been a case of the customs officials who processed it being over-zealous. Or they might have been on autopilot because they'd had several non-compliant items so they put one of those labels on by mistake even though it was just a case of the addressee having moved away.
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