That’s all true, but you are leaving out an important piece of information that, at least for AliExpress, the VAT is already included in the price and there’s no additional customs processing fee.
Order something from the US into Europe? Expect to pay customs most of the time. From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto. China? Rarely.
"Dont want to be stuck in the morass of EU red tape" is more like it. Not that US red tape is any better, mind you, but suffice to say that unless you have massive scale, registration schemes will make you ROI negative unless you are making >100k in sales per month from the country in question.
Some even require registration by region. For example GER vs UK vs FR and rest a while back, all needed separate registration. And the paperwork is usually in the home coun try official language. Ha joke is on you when you start getting tax authority messages. They arent saying bonjour!
Source: i did this for my company.
And by you I mean PostNord in the case of Denmark
I get stuff delivered from the UK to the EU very regularly and all competent sellers handle VAT and duties just fine without additional processing fees. Smaller companies don’t always bother, though, but most of the time I don’t have to pay customs because everything is declared properly.