1.1.2015 – EU MOSS VAT Change Compliance

  • Hi everyone. This topic concerns any company or individual who sells any kind of digital service to EU customers. So this also applies (at least in theory – because enforceability is not yet known)to non EU residents/companies selling any non hardware good to the EU.

    So far for digital services – the location of the company in B2C trade was the determining factor on the VAT rate. Now for any transaction it will be based on the location of the customer.
    The location needs to be proofed by TWO independent factors. For s2member and paypal this would mean e.g. IP address conforms with the country of the payment address in the paypal profile. Other possibilities would be if there could be an obligatory country field for the customer to enter – and that matches the IP. Or landline (not mobile!) telephone number country code matches address or IP.

    It will be illegal to sell any e-services (such as a membership) to EU customers without before knowing if a) they are private or business customer b) have 2 independant (as given above) non conflicting factors to determine their location.

    This really needs to be checked by s2member.

    Also there would be a need to block people from some EU countries (e.g. Poland) who have invoice regulations that are so complicated that I cannot conduct business with Polish customers anymore – as any sale would mean a loss to me due to administration overhead.

    So s2member should block customers from country XX to checkout.

    Of course while in theory any non EU company/private selling e.g. a membership for a site to people in the EU (also to tourists traveling through the EU!!!!) – it will be difficult to enforce for EU bodies. They did announce however to specifically work together with US law enforcement agencies to get US companies to comply and use spiders/bots to track this down.

    The best resource about the changes I have found here:
    https://www.taxamo.com/blog/

    But basically if s2member is not able to follow the law here, dropping Paypal, Stripe or any other payment gateway that does not follow the law is the only solution. So far only markets such as the Apple Appstore, Google Play or Amazon marketplace take over that tax/invoice work.

    And I know even less what to do with all subscriptions. Probably I will have to cancel them all and ask to reapply under new EU terms.

    Basically if there are no easy solutions, my business is ruined.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/s2member/

Viewing 11 replies - 31 through 41 (of 41 total)
  • Thread Starter extremecarver

    (@extremecarver)

    Yes I am – hoping that my dev finishes the main work on Friday…

    Ok.
    Please post an update because this is going to kill many businesses.
    I guess you ll get an addon for s2member, right?

    I was starting to develop an invoice addon for s2member only to find out that new vat law for EU clients, now I dont know which way to go:

    Dedicate time to add vatapi to the addon I started, run to the hills and close my business for eu clients….so confused.

    Thread Starter extremecarver

    (@extremecarver)

    I hope to be able to post code here on Saturday. So far my dev has developed everything except invoicing and old subscribtions.. (working through all old emails) but only got 5 more hours left for doing so…
    IP check is currently done via vatapi.com – but I need to get that to a inbuilt solution – as the checks will be too costly (10-20 checks for each checkout, because showing the checkout forms/payment stuff often was the best way to increase conversion rates for me)

    As for Stripe payments – I will probably handle them using octobat.com – that’s a full integration needing no work on your own site as it seems no. I just need to test it out a bit more (spend 2 working days figuring out how SSL certs work, which to get for my sites, and then in the end ordering EV certs noticing I need to update some address info on my company registration and so on… time is running out now…).

    Got really bugged down – that s2member downloads do not work once I switched my whole site to https:// – will open up another topic for that soon. There seems to be some s2member code not compatible. Users were redirected to payment page if I truly enforced https:// only (strangely it works just fine if people simply enter the https://)

    Hi, we’ve updated our EU EDD VAT plugin to give users, particularly US sellers, the ability to restrict sales to EU consumers because these sales require that even non-EU businesses register for VAT with the tax authority of an EU member state. Vendors will probably want to continue selling to EU businesses because different rules apply and these sales do not require VAT registration. EDD VAT plugin

    Thread Starter extremecarver

    (@extremecarver)

    I can probably post my solution tomorrow – sorry for the delay… It will require 2-3 calls to vatapi.com for each sale!

    Ok guys.
    Thanks a lot for the updates.

    @extremecarver Thanks for your contribution. We released a free solution for WooCommerce and we know how costly it is to develop and maintain such a plugin (we are also in the high end of the four figures area). We appreciate the effort to help the community.

    Hi

    I wanted to let you know we’ve updated our EU VAT plug in to allow for different VAT rates for different products in different countries. There’s a video here which shows how easy this is to set up. This will make selling in the EU and complying with the VAT regulations much easier.

    Hi Beth.

    You already posted your easy digital download payment plugin sometimes so no need to post again and again unless you have something new to offer like for example a s2member addon.

    Thread Starter extremecarver

    (@extremecarver)

    Okay – here you go:
    Prerequisites:
    1. Install the GeoIP Maxmind Plugin
    2. Create an empty Page called “Payment Button”
    3. Install into your theme the following file: https://www.velomap.org/plugin_vat/template_velomap_paybutton.php.txt (and remove .txt ending)
    4. Install the plugin: https://www.velomap.org/plugin_vat/mc_velomap.php.txt (and remove .txt ending)

    Note – you will have to adapt it with your data. and get a VatAPI.com account. You will need to replace all “velomap” references with your own domain…

    It currently sets a drowpdown for several fields to checkout – it should be easy to understand and adapt.

    Expect 2-3 hours to get it working! Good luck before midnight…

    Thread Starter extremecarver

    (@extremecarver)

    If you want to clean up the plugin with more variables for domain settings and names – please go ahead…
    See it working here: https://www.velomap.org/support/membership/

Viewing 11 replies - 31 through 41 (of 41 total)
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