extremecarver

Oh great – didn’t find that EU VAT thread before – Otherwise I would have added this topic to it. That’s very helpful. Well I also contacted the VAT plugin coders for EDD and asked them for help. (wouldn’t mind moving away from s2member knowing that any kind of EU regulations don’t seem to matter to s2member coders/company).

s2renewal reminders I’m using already. Great plugin (though could have some more options about old users – I was in contact with the coder but than lost track as it was a very busy period).

Oh true – here is the plugin:
https://www.lyquidity.com/wpstore/2013/10/vat-for-edd/

Well – it would be great if someone could build such a plugin for S2member. Because this is absolutely essential for any membership site worldwide – if the ever have a EU based customer (or even US/whatever visitor being in EU on vacation).

I did not realize reading it that the plugin actually takes care of it already accordingly.

Well I’m not so sure. As I can read here Easy Digital Downloads plugin gave up on it:
https://github.com/easydigitaldownloads/Easy-Digital-Downloads/issues/2137

It’s clearly not easy at all to implement properly from everything I gathered so far, and noone really knows how it will work.

And yeah – been plenty of times to the UK. Would prefer to have my business there. UK government is usually protecting it’s companies from EU craziness (in case of possible audits – which can be brought in by any of the 28 member countries -whether or not you did any business there). In Austria the government loves to slap on additional charges to you, instead of any help. Also no-one here is currently able to tell you anything about the exact regulations.

Well – I’m still quite in the dark – BTW – here are a few expamples of vaild addresses:
https://www.taxamo.com/eu-consumers-location/

It’s not even sure a user entered address is valid proof!!! Paypal billing /shipment adress should be.

If no s2member dev does anything about this in the next 7 days – I’m, well open to pay good money for implementation. Also if that means going via taxamo.js in order to make it easier. (in that case no problem to block countries – as taxamo will automate the invoicing and also run proper checks on the country – but I don’t really know their API).

I’ll also need to have customers from Cyprus, Poland, Romania and Slovenia – because I do not know how to create valid invoices for residents of these countries. Romania and Poland are real nightmares about invoices – because they do not use € – and require that the invoice is made in local currencies! Cyprus and Slovenia have laxer laws – and use the €.

I have too many customers from the Netherlands and Italy as both countries require full invoices (paypal is not doing that – actually cannot) to block payments from there – but would advise anyone not having many customers in theese 2 countries to do so!
France would also be on that list for payments over 25€ including VAT.

I do hope that the standard paypal payment mail is enough for Lithuania. I will inquire more about it. Else I would recommend blocking it too. Same goes for Finland (under German/Austrian law “paypal invoice” is a simplified invoice and hence enough). Luckily both are Euro countries.

See here why I chose those countries to be blocked: https://www.taxamo.com/moss-invoicing-revealed/

And requiring people to enter two addresses – before paying – I’m sure to loose 50% of them before they pay.

Also at least in Austria – we have no Papyal Payments Pro. Only Web Payments Standard and Express Checkout (plus Digital Products Express Checkout)

– the only good procedure would be to have the people pay. Then have s2member or some other plugin check if the IP address matches the country given in the paypal address – then send out another email for accounting summarising this and the payment amount/country.

That the IP is from the same country as the address paypal provides. And that check better be automatic.
In case it’s not – there would need to be an additional email to the customer aksing him to provide further proof – or else block the account and return the payment!

Oh and worse – about 5% of people paying – never register. So I would need to crosscheck there too – and return them their money if there is no full determination of their country BEFORE they pay, or WHILE they pay. Or at least s2member would need to link payments without registred account to IP (and return payments if there is conflict).

This better be done by s2member automatically for everyone who has EU IP. There is no limit at all – you have someone sign up for 1USD to your US membership site – and you get a controll – you will pay hefty charges (for some EU countries the fines start at over 5000€ for 1€ VAT not paid).

Also sometimes people pay with emails at paypal which are not reachable. Or register wrongly. I already spend ages to filter out payments from non EU countries right now. But checking every EU payment for 2 non conflicting country indicators would just be madness. That needs to be automatic.

Yes – but I need to check that the IP is the same. Which I can tell you – it is not for my customers in about 10% of the cases! (namely people traveling).
So If I don’t have a check that works, it will be plain nightmare. Currently tax consultants recommend to have 3 factors – if you cannot check them – in order to limit work.

And there is no automatic way to return paypal payments, and I need an automatic check. Average payments are about 15€ including VAT. So if I deduct VAT/payment processor fees only – without any other costs – I’m already well below 11€. Now I cannot spend 10-20minutes on average to check that. Impossible to employ someone for below 50€ in Austria qualified to do that (if I spend 50€ per hour – with our social system maybe 17-18€ end up at the employee). The cost to make sure that payments are correct, would be higher than the income. Not considering other costs. So if there is no automatic way that works in 97-98% of all cases – I can shut down. As simple as that.

Papyal will not do it. They pass it back to the website. I spend hours on support calls with them already. Stripe is not available in Austria yet – so I currently use Papyal besides bank transfers (which are horrible from the new law too).

I already set up Paypal to not accept any payment without address – right from when I started to use s2member. Sadly this is not working if people enter countries or incorrect adresses – then I will be forced to return payments (2-3%).

The problem is – as laid out – address is NOT enough. One needs two INDEPENDENT factors to determine the country which both place the user into a specific country.

Paypal will neither hand out the credit card number (could be used to check for the country) nor the IP of the user. And so far you can only ask for a delivery address with s2member – it’s unsure if that will count at all. Would need to have the Paypal billing address to fully comply with EU law to my understanding.

Even worse for subscriptions. I think subscriptions will cause huge headache in accounting – as paypal doesn’t even include any address in the payment mails – but sends you the address in separate mails – so you can spend 1-2 minutes per payment to look up the country – then send invoice if required, then if you don’t get all that info return the payment if you cannot get that info from the user – then store all that info for 10 years!

So basically old subscriptions are useless now – I have spoke with my tax consultant and he advised me to cancel them all, or move outside of EU jurisdiction…

In the end I would end up doing nothing but trying to comply, not having any more time to actually work on my products.

Oh yeah – here’s the guideline published by the EU (but that doesn’t explain at all how to do it – it only lists the requirements):
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/one-stop-shop_guidelines_en.pdf

As for users of s2member who are not doing a lot of business with EU customers – s2member should have an option to block them from paying altogether.

That’s in the US.
In Europe Amazon Payments is 1.9% + 0,30 base!!!!
However you can easily get it down to 1.5 plus 0,30… because they strive to undercut paypal.

Same for Paypal Germany (well Austria is a different matter, but you can negotiate if you have some turnover). Also chargebacks are 10€ while you pay 15€ at stripe – and oh free on Papyal meaning you can negotiate them out at Amazon – again because they will do everything to undercut paypal.

Stripe is not even really interested to do business in Europe – or at least that’s how it seems to me. And it’s only available in select European countries – while Amazon Payments is available more or less worldwide if you qualify.

Also loads of users trust Amazon – that’s actually the key point. With Stripe it doesn’t give you any additional credibility…

AND – nearly everyone has an amazon account – so that means users login and BAM…
With Stripe users need to enter all their data. That is costing lot’s of conversion! So say it’s 1% more expensive, and you lose 10% of your customers on checkout. Hell, that’s really expensive – you end up with 10% gross loss, and 1% more costs…

Also I’m not sure if Stripe provides somehow acceptable income statements. In the end it could mean you spend countless additional hours on your income statement. I don’t really know about that one, but with Amazon I at least have a European (Luxembourg) Union company department to deal with – with Stripe I am begging at a US company…

So for European users Amazon is big, and Stripe is just another rather useless alternative…

Nope – all editors that show separate tabs seem to rely on TinyMCE autoformat madness…

E.g. FolioPress shows stuff a bit different (already tries to consider the width of the page and so on), has different more extensive editing tools – but still messes up with Autoformat.

The only working solution for me is Deans FCKEditor plugin – but that hasn’t seen an update since years – so I wonder for how long it keeps working (just noted some bugs on a badly programmed payment plugin – though that’s the first time I ran into a bug with it).

Yeah – and the other solution is to disable visual editor and use html editor. But no thanks – that not my cup of tea for general use.

Edit – well: https://ithemes.com/2012/03/30/security-alert-deans-fckeditor-with-pwwangs-code-plugin-for-wordpress/

means actually don’t use Dean’s – security hole. Now that’s getting messy for me…

Thanks – it’s mainly working now. However for titles without any language tags, it still adds them. Why can there be no setting to use mqtranslate without ANY editor changing.

Just leave any editor or changes alone – add a mode that gets rid of any frontend changes except the settings.

Then one can use shortcodes for everything simple, write Text like

Language 1
Language 2
ALL LANGAUGES
Language 1
Language2

using the full language codes in html editor. That saves plenty of reduplication if you can for example post instructions in each language – then a long link list or pictures without any langauge (meaning the show in every language) – then go back to translated parts – instead of having everything for each langauge separate…

Best would be if there could be [/:en] language exit shortcodes… Then one could even stay in visual editor without html editor.

Fully getting rid of editor changes would make mqtranslate also a much slimmer and less breakable plugin…

Now the even bigger problem with standard editor is. If you disable mqtranslate Editor, via setting unsupported Version – you also loose visual editor. Only html editor available – so that’s not usable at all without switching to another editor…

(of which only Deans FCKEditor doesn’t crash my lines breaks – but therefore now has problems with another plugin).

I have the same problem! (even if I disable the editor via setting:
define(‘QT_MIN_SUPPORTED_WP_MINOR_VERSION’, ‘3.8’);
define(‘QT_MAX_SUPPORTED_WP_MAJOR_VERSION’, ‘3.8’);

in mqtranslate.php…

Only if I use a very old not supported editor it works again (Deans FCKEditor for WordPress)..

I really hate all that editor munging qtranslate or mqtranslate do. I use shorctodes and don’t ever want to see a separate window per language. That makes editing impossible and painful if you have more than 2 or 3 languages activated.

I would just love if mqtranslate doesn’t mess with the editor. But well, Qtranslate did so too and with Qtranslate I also lost all empty lines (except if used together with Deans FCKEditor).

If it’s not opening than have a look if there are any other [] action blocks that are not wrapped around correctly, or even better look at html view in the editor to see if there are any other actions conflicting..

I noticed Shortcode Toggle is quite breakable in this regard (or better said – very sensitive regarding unclean code/usage).