Please talk to an accountant in your country. Even though many things in EU are unified and standardized, the local laws are always a bit twisted, there are exceptions and rules that vary country by country, etc.
I am not an accountant, so take my reply with a big grain of salt. I will tell you how things work in Czechia and most likely they are similar in other EU countries. But in the end, you will have to talk to an actual accountant to make sure anyway.
First of all, what matters is whether you (or your business) are VAT registered or not. If you are not VAT registered, then probably there is nothing you can do, you pay the VAT and that’s it. Every year, you may get some fixed % of your yearly incomes counted as your expenses for tax reasons, etc., all depends on your local laws. I am not sure EU has unified laws on that, probably not.
Now, if you are VAT registered, then you most likely have an accountant or an external accounting company dealing with VAT for you. But there are generally 2 cases to consider:
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If you make a purchase within your own country, you pay the VAT, but at the end of the month, you can get the VAT (or a part of the VAT) back depending on the overall VAT transactions you made in that month. For example, if you buy products with 200 EUR VAT and sell products worth 50 EUR VAT, you might get 150 EUR back that month. This is being handled by your accountants.
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If you make a purchase from abroad, you should always make sure to tell the shop that you are VAT registered in another EU country, the product will be imported to your country, and hence you will pay 0% tax to them and you get an invoice stating a 0% VAT on that purchase abroad. After you receive the item, then you pay the local VAT to your local authorities instead, and then you follow point (1) above. However, the problem is that some foreign companies will not want to give you an invoice with a 0% VAT (which includes Framework), so you might be paying the tax twice in the end (once on the invoice and then the local tax authority will ask for the local tax as well). Asking for getting one of the taxes back is a painful process that involves dealing with tax offices in two countries and they will simply tell you that you should have asked for a 0% VAT invoice in the first place.
All this only matters if you are a business, because as a simple customer, you do not care about any of this, you simply pay the VAT and potential import taxes, but that is all already handled by Framework and FedEx, so the final price is the one you see on the invoice.
As a business, though, if you are VAT registered, what is important is whether your Framework purchase falls under (1) or (2). And this is the tricky part, because Framework is registered in the US, the laptop is shipped from Taiwan, but the invoice already contains the local VAT in the receiving country. Technically, the VAT ID on the invoice is what kind of matters. For my invoice (for a German shipping address), the VAT ID was French, but the tax was 19%, which corresponds to Germany. So a bit confusing. For that reason, I’d believe the purchase might fall under (1), but I am not sure about it. Unless you do freight forwarding to another EU country, which’d fall quite certainly under (2). But you really need to ask an accountant.
