EU VAT and the rest of the world

You would need to setup a tax rates table at Settings > Tax tab, Standard rates page. See:
https://docs.woothemes.com/document/setting-up-taxes-in-woocommerce/

In brief, you would need a line in the table for each country in the EU, and finally a catch-all which is * for the country meaning anywhere else, with the global rate.

If your tax rate depends on the shop-base location, the tax rate in the table would be the same for each EU country.

Note that when a user starts to shop, WC doesn’t know what country they come from. So you would need to show prices with VAT as an extra, with a note that VAT applies to EU customers only, and will be removed if not applicable after an address is entered.

WooCommerce has recently added a geolocation feature to make the above easier, though I’ve not tried that myself.

@simongiddings, if you need help populating the EU VAT rates, you can use our free EU VAT Assistant plugin. It can populate all VAT rates with one click (see screenshot).
After doing that, you can either remove the plugin, or keep using it if you need to comply with VAT MOSS regulations, or even just validate EU VAT numbers for B2B transactions.

We also developed a plugin that allows to show the correct tax as soon as the customer lands on the site. I won’t post a link because it’s a premium product, but you can read about it in the EU VAT Assistant FAQs.

Thank you lorro, this is what I was thinking.
However, I was not sure how to avoid double taxing – country specific and “catch all *” rates.
Would I be right in thinking that I would need to put the catch all rate at a lower priority to avoid this ?
I ask this as the doc is not sufficiently clear for me. It doesn’t explain if priorities are applied lowest first or highest first to start with.

My understanding is that the lines in the table are examined in order until a match to the user’s address is found, so the “rest-of-the-world” line is last.

@lorro that’s correct. WooCommerce stops as soon as it finds the first matching tax rate. The line with “*” should be the last, so that it will be used if none of the others applies.

Great, thankyou gentlemen, for your help in this matter.
I will start testing the plugin @diego mentioned and see how I go.

Sorry if my question is lame, but why wouldn’t you apply the same VAT for non-eu customers? Does it mean your non-eu customers have to pay tax locally?
What if you do not “export” the product (and pay the VAT in EU)?