I’d like to buy a new car from German Mercedes online store and export it to Switzerland.
Tried to call 3-4 official garages and they told me they are not going to provide export service for the car from online store (I have no idea why). Anyway, pretty easily I found number of car exporters who can buy a car VAT free and then resell it to me for export purposes (all of them charge around 3% net price if it is important). Even after all the fees it is way more cheaper then buying in Swiss, well in fact Swiss dealers do not even have the model I want.
My problem is that I can’t verify whether or not these car export companies is a scam.
For instance let’s look at this one
DI-Automobile & Leasing GmbH ( https://www.netto-export.eu/ )
Is there any way I can verify the compony.? I checked German registration website it seems that the compony really exists and have around 2 millions of assets (at least as I understand it) https://www.unternehmensregister.de/…1F32EA.web04-1
The point here is that it doesn’t prove anything or check compony’s geniuses in any way. How can I make sure I transfer money to.someone worthtrusty? Probably someone used their services and can give couple of comments (they only have 4 fake Google reviews)? Any advice is highly appreciated.
This particular company is just an example, in general I would want to figure how to verify any potential exporter.
Unfortunately I can't give you a direct advice, but .. and I do know it takes some time, wouldn't it be easier and a bit cheaper to just call any Mercedes Dealership or Garage in Germany, the ones which have your model + colour + whatever else you want/ need and ask them if they can do at least all the export paperwork for you ?
In theory you pay a deposit, go get your car with export licence plate (pay the full amount when getting the car) and just go to the border, declare the car, pay taxes here --> and waste another 3 hours sometime (I think you can also go without a reservation) to do the MFK (being a brand new car I actually don't think it matters if the mechanic specks or not english, since he/she/it won't find any issue with it).
After that you will waste one more hour to go to the STVA, register the car, get licence plate + mount plate and get grey card. That should be all.
And I do support the lack of trust for certain dealers and garages, because I come from Eastern Europe and I do have the mentality (which occasionally is good) that everyone wants to scam you
Yeah, I of course called number of dealers and visited couple of them in person (in Lörrach and Singen). The whole point as I understand it is since the car is from Mercedes online store it is not being sold by the dealer. They just deliver it to their garage. And since they did not sale it they can't organize export paperwork (register the car in ATLAS system in particular). So the only way to get a VAT return (assuming online store itself won't provide export service) is to use some sort of broker (business in Germany) who can buy VAT-free and then resell it to me (VAT-free as well, or full price with with export paperwork).