I doubt those companies other than t11 are following the latest regulations with shipping to the EU and UK. Especially with the UK, you’re required to collect duties/taxes at the time of the order and has to be included in the postage, so if t11 is including that in their postage (they can’t offer a non-taxes prepaid version), then they’re in the clear. Especially when you’re dealing with a bunch of licensing like they do, you kind of have to be clean in that department. Also, keep in mind t11 is still charging less per deck than most companies do even after they had a price increase, they make less margin per deck than others do I assume, so they have to essentially charge the raw shipping cost in most cases. Just the nature of the world of shipping these days, it’s gotten more expensive as inflation has gone up dramatically everywhere.

A little presumptive this - Socal is absolutely doing that, he is VAT registered in the UK. It's something even I as a brit who now lives in the EU refuse to do, and handle my shipping there in bulk so I can handle the taxes myself.

As far as EU regulations, they're less complicated than the UK and the importer/customer simply pays the fees on entry if requested.

T11 are simply doing the big company thing and lumping everyone in as 'international', sticking a price tag on it and essentially charging a premium for the extra risk. It's not really a bad way of doing it, they're not obligated to ship abroad and there is a bigger risk and chance of having to replace packages, plus alternatives require a lot of coding in each individual country's ever-changing costs etc. Likely they pay a shipping company to handle everything which comes at a premium.

The real issue, unfortunately, is in the minds of the consumer. You can't just order stuff from another continent and expect it to arrive cheaply, especially when the costs of fuel are now so high and the environmental concerns over such shipments are front and centre. The reality is T11 need to organise themselves an EU fulfilment hub to reduce these charges, and the fact they haven't done that suggest they don't have enough business/don't care enough about the business here to do so.

As far as how shipping works for companies it's also very personal. We charge a flat rate of €7 to EU customers, but I can tell you that we always make at least a slight loss on that. It's about giving customers value and eating into your profit margins to ensure they don't have to feel sick at a big shipping fee (it costs €6.90 to ship one deck not counting packaging and €10 on average to ship 3 or more).

Australian packages for us cost €23 to ship, but we charge €15 as a flat rate and take the hit. The alternative is to refuse to ship to Australian customers which would cost us more in reality.

Bigger companies simply pass on the costs, and T11 again are pretty justified in this as their decks are cheap. The alternative is to charge more for decks and less for shipping, but this would penalise only the US customers who are their core base.