The main reason for this change, which was agreed in 2008 and came into effect on the 1st of January 2015, is to stop companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and other large companies from enjoying low taxes as they base their digital services arm in Luxembourg. For ebooks, they enjoy a low 3% sales tax. A very nice loophole for these large corporations but it has rightly so been closed.<p>The knock on effect is that small business and retailers have to deal with this new EU VAT change too where VAT needs to be calculated at the customers location rather than the sellers location. Once they do this, they then need to report it to their respective government. This adds a lot of administrative burden on small sellers that are barely making any sales.<p>The most important thing that the EU could have done which they didn't do is to have a threshold so that small business and individuals aren't affected. Recently, Japan introduced a similar change but maintained a threshold to protect small businesses: <a href="http://www.vatlive.com/asia-pacific/japan-consumption-tax-foreign-e-services-consumers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vatlive.com/asia-pacific/japan-consumption-tax-fo...</a><p>The EU VAT change is an unnecessary burden for small business and individuals which is why we handle VAT completely for our customers.<p>I am the founder of Payhip: <a href="https://payhip.com" rel="nofollow">https://payhip.com</a>
Here is a blog post by Andrus Ansip, the European Commissioner for the Digital Single Market, on the new EU VAT rules. It's not a particularly supportive or re-assuring post given the criticisms of the new rules<p><a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/ansip/blog/euvat_en" rel="nofollow">https://ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/ansip/blog/euvat_e...</a><p>Apparently these rules were agreed in 2008. Countries have obviously failed to communicate the impending changes. I liked this comment below the post:<p><i>"And so much for it being in place since 2008.<p>This is akin to the Vogons in Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy claiming that the plans for Earths destruction have been available for viewing on Alpha Centauri for 50 years."</i>
As I mention in my post below, if you're a non-EU company selling digital goods and services to EU customers, then strictly speaking these new rules don't change much - it's was already the case that non-EU suppliers that supply electronically supplied services to EU customers (B2C transactions, not B2B) should be charging the customer VAT at their local rate.<p>Businesses could choose to register in each state or a single one using the VoES (VAT on e-services) system. These rules have been in place since 2003.<p>However I imagine that a lot of non-EU companies didn't bother with this either out of ignorance or simply because they didn't care or thought it could be enforced.<p>Under these new rules, MOSS replaces VoES but it's practically the same thing. This mostly affects EU businesses who now have to charge the rate where the customer belongs, not where the supplier belongs.
A couple of useful resources if you need to calculate VAT rates across Europe and Stripe's fees in each country:
<a href="http://jsonvat.com/" rel="nofollow">http://jsonvat.com/</a>,
<a href="https://stripefees.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stripefees.com/</a>
Yet another reason why, as a startup, you should stay far away from writing your own payment processing - unless you're a payment startup.<p>It's not a timesink, it's a freaking black hole.
The new EU rules are only for digital products right? So how about selling a "magic bean" that comes with a free download of whatever you're selling? Or sell a "planting of a seed" service that has a user area that contains special bonuses, like a download of whatever.<p>Are these workable or too far out?
Extract more money from Amazon by harming small businesses, because no tax is ever high or complicated enough! Hooray! Everybody is so much better off now that we have to pay more money to the EU to conduct business. It's so great.
What is to prevent some guy from making a US business that does nothing other than sell EU businesses' products to customers on their behalf ?<p>Because selling products to the US is VAT-exempt, and US companies selling to EU customers is also VAT-exempt.<p>I'm betting the first company doing this will be amazon.