Dale

I am sorry for the long delay replying to your scenario.  As it happens, I have some experience of a similar problem.  The only approach I know of is to seek to avoid paying EU duty.  UK duty will always be payable.

The legal and administrative procedure that appears best, assuming that the Swedish company does not know in advance which of the imported products will ultimately be sold in the UK, is:

• Swedish company imports the goods into a Customs warehouse using procedure 7100.
• Shipments for the EU market are discharged from the warehouse with import declaration procedure 4071.
• Shipments for the UK are discharged with export declaration 3171.
• Import to the UK is a standard procedure 1000.  Duty is payable for origin China.  In the unlikely event that HMRC questions non-preferential origin, evidence of discharge from warehouse and/or re-export from Sweden should be available.

If the process of warehousing is not judged worthwhile or practical for operational reasons, the only other option I am aware of would be to tranship the goods out of temporary storage.  While this is legally possible, the organisation of it may be difficult, as goods would need to be sorted and redirected in a temporary storage facility.  Warehousing gives more flexibility.

Finally, there is the problem of returned goods.  These are most easily handled by establishing (perhaps by contract) a handler in the UK that could group such goods and send them either to the Swedish company or to the Chinese seller as appropriate.  I am aware that some online platforms are now prepared to give refunds without requiring the return of low value items.

Hope this helps.

Tony