We frankly agree that this situation is onerous and absurd, but please direct your grievance to the parties responsible for deciding and imposing these new requirements, and who also have the power to change them, namely your national and EU government representatives.



This site is one of the most clearly informative resources for laymen that we've found explaining the new VAT rules, and seems to be the foremost in organizing the effort at redress:

http://euvataction.org/



We have no operational presence based in the EU and thus have no representation nor influence with EU decision makers, so we can only do our best to accommodate these new regulations as they have already been enacted, as a convenience for our clientele.



Unfortunately, the EU VAT rules require that sellers must display the buyer's final price including VAT before checkout, and since VAT on digital goods has now become a variable amount depending on the buyer's verified "place of supply", only two approaches can satisfy that requirement:



A) Simple method: set a flat gross price for all buyers that includes VAT overhead;



B) Complex method: conclusively determine each buyer's place of supply before dynamically calculating their final price incl. VAT to display on your sales pages.



The new VAT rules specify that "place of supply" on digital items must be verified by collecting at least 3 unrelated pieces of location data, only one of which can be arbitrarily self-declared by the buyer, and identifying a country match between at least 2 of those data points. For web-based sales, this effectively means obtaining a 2-way match between a GeoIP country lookup of the buyer's connection IP, the Billing/Residence address registered to the buyer's payment account, and any buyer self-declared location such as a Shipping address or cart-selected country.



Therefore, the complex method B described above would effectively require full-featured traditional ecommerce software that not only provides shopping cart functionality but also generates your site's storefront pages and manages checkout as a self-contained process; in this scenario, buyers would need to register for a customer profile account on your site and provide address details to verify their place of supply, so they can be logged into that account before shopping where your storefront could calculate final prices incl. VAT to display to each buyer.



That method simply cannot work with E-junkie, as we provide neither storefront-generation nor customer profile functionality. We merely provide purchase buttons to paste into your own site, and we only obtain sufficient buyer information to verify their place of supply after checkout has already been completed, so the simple method A described above, which was proposed and strongly demanded by sellers in the earlier VAT thread here, was the only feasible approach left for us to implement.

Now, regarding the suggestion to set different prices for non-EU vs. EU buyers, you can already accomplish this right now, without needing to create duplicate products nor maintain separate seller accounts.



One approach would use the &amount= parameter on your button URLs to boost the price on your EU buyers' purchase button URLs. With this approach, your products' Price settings would be the non-EU price, so you'd just use your regular button code for non-EU buyers. For EU buyers, you'd provide separate buttons for the exact same products, but these button codes would include an &amount= parameter to add VAT overhead to the item's base Price setting.



For Add to Cart buttons, the specified &amount= value gets ADDED TO the item's base Price; however, for Buy Now buttons, the &amount= value OVERRIDES the item's base Price setting as long as the &amount= exceeds that base Price. E.g., an Add to Cart button that adds an extra 12.34 to the base Price would look like this (where XXXXXX is your E-junkie Client ID and YYYYYY is your product's Item Number):



<a href="https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?c=cart&ejc=2&cl=XXXXXX&i=YYYYYY&amount=12.34" target="ejejc" class="ec_ejc_thkbx" onclick="return EJEJC_lc(this);"><img src="//www.e-junkie.com/ej/ej_add_to_cart.gif" border="0" alt="Add to Cart"></a>



A different approach would use our "Variants having individual price/weight/stock/SKU" feature, where you'd set up each product with Variants to determine EU vs. non-EU prices. This has the advantage of allowing you to update prices in Seller Admin later without having to edit any button codes already in your page, as long as you don't change the corresponding option values for your Variants. To follow the examples I'll provide here, you'd want to familiarize yourself with our Variants configuration as described here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.variants.htm#variants



E.g., a product with an EU price of 30.00 and rest-of-world (ROW) price of 25.00 could Define Variants with Option 1 Name = "VAT" and a configuration like this:



EU,30.00,,,Y,,

ROW,25.00,,,N,,



A neat trick here is that you don't need to depend on buyers to select the proper product option from a dropdown menu; rather, you can provide separate Add to Cart buttons for EU and ROW buyers that hard-code the proper option into their respective button URLs -- this tutorial explains this general technique in more detail:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.variants.button-tutorial.htm



E.g., following the example Variants configuration above, your Add to Cart button for EU buyers would look like this (again, where XXXXXX is your E-junkie Client ID and YYYYYY is your product's Item Number):



<a href="https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?c=cart&ejc=2&cl=XXXXXX&i=YYYYYY&o1=Y" target="ejejc" class="ec_ejc_thkbx" onclick="return EJEJC_lc(this);"><img src="//www.e-junkie.com/ej/ej_add_to_cart.gif" border="0" alt="Add to Cart"></a>

To address a few remaining points:



While HMRC in the UK has been able to enact some concessions to ease the burden on UK merchants, those don't apply to sellers based elsewhere in the EU, and our VAT solution has to work for all EU sellers.



VAT on physical products remains subject to the VAT rate in the seller's country, rather than the buyer's place of supply. Products which have Shipping/Buyer's Address enabled will calculate VAT as physical goods at the seller's VAT rate. Since we now have to wait until after checkout to calculate VAT for digital products, as a practical matter we now have to calculate VAT for all products by the same method at the same time. Your Transaction Log will show separate VAT totals for each VAT rate applied to each order.



Our understanding is that EU sellers who have a VAT MOSS in their own country can just file EU-wide VAT returns with their domestic VAT MOSS, which would then redistribute any VAT due to other EU jurisdictions. Offhand, I'm not sure if EU sellers without a domestic VAT MOSS can file with another country's VAT MOSS; perhaps an EU merchant in this position can respond here to clarify.



It appears that non-EU sellers are now expected to collect and remit VAT on digital product sales to EU buyers, though we're frankly hard-pressed to fathom any actual consequences whatsoever that low-volume digital-goods sellers outside EU jurisdiction could possibly suffer for failure to comply. Non-EU sellers can comply by filing all their EU VAT returns with a VAT MOSS in just one EU country (e.g., the UK's VAT MOSS).

The product-level Sales Tax/VAT setting just determines whether that item is subject to whatever Sales Tax and/or VAT calculation may be configured for your account in Seller Admin > Sales Tax / VAT Settings. I see you do have Sales Tax but not VAT configured for your account, so your log should not be calculating VAT on any sales. Thanks for reporting this bug; I will bring that to Development's attention.

PrintChapIs it possible to have two additional fields in the transactions log? I would like a numeric data only tax field and a country of residence field (as in the old logs). This will make sorting and reporting for VAT MOSS an lot easier. Thank you.

Note that your Web-based Transaction Log view is intended as a human-readable format, which differs from the downloadable log export file we provide in a machine-readable format suitable for spreadsheet programs or other software tools. When you have EU VAT enabled, the downloadable log includes new columns at the end reporting discrete values for VAT-related data.



I'm asking Development to clarify what some of these fields are reporting, so we might yet revise the field labels and/or the order in which they appear, but that should be settled within a few days. Once we've got that finalized, our Transaction Log help page will document the new fields:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.transaction-log.htm

lorilinThe only thing I'm still confused about is shipping charges. I have to charge EU VAT on shipping as well. Now I'm set up to have variable shipping charges based on weight, and whether the customer wants "signed for" delivery or not.



I'm guessing I can edit/redo all my shipping rules so that the EU shipping prices include VAT, and the non-EU shipping prices don't. Am I right about this being the simplest way?

Actually, the simplest thing you could do would be to set Handling as a % of Shipping in your Cart Shipping Settings. That'd just boost all your shipping calculations by whatever % you specify for every order. :^)

The bug that allowed VAT calculation to happen for sellers who don't have VAT enabled has been fixed as of yesterday morning, but Development still needs to retroactively correct the logs for sellers who were affected by the bug, which they said they'd be doing today. This log correction should merely delete any VAT calculated by mistake and then recalculate affected affiliate commissions accordingly.

Our VAT calculation does not add VAT to any transaction; it only calculates after the fact how much of the total price paid would constitute VAT. You can simply disregard any VAT amount(s) we calculate if you determine you are not subject to pay it.

That list of filename extensions only determines what we regard as an "ebook" product as distinct from any other downloadable product, to accommodate jurisdictions that specify a reduced VAT rate on ebook sales in particular while other downloads are subject to the regular VAT rate.



Our VAT calculation feature is only intended to handle the rather complicated requirements of EU VAT. However, for Australian GST, you won't need to include a markup in your item prices to cover GST, as that can be handled using normal sales tax-style calculation; just enable Sales Tax/VAT in your products' settings, then in Seller Admin > Sales Tax/VAT Settings checkmark "Tax buyers from country", select Australia, and enter your domestic GST rate as the tax rate.

We have recently updated our Sales Tax & VAT help page to explain our new VAT calculation behavior and the new Transaction Log fields that report data for VAT purposes:

2http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.tax.htm2



We have also updated our help pages for Thank-you Emails and Thank-you Pages to document new template tags we now support to insert VAT details:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.custom.thankyou-email.htm

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.custom.thankyou-page.htm



Here's a quick outline of the new template tags for VAT:



For Common Thank-you Page HTML and all Thank-you Emails:

[%country_digital%] = VAT place of supply for digital items

[%country_tangible%] = VAT place of supply for non-digital items

[%vat_digital%] = Order subtotal of VAT calculated for digital items

[%vat_tangible%] = Order subtotal of VAT calculated for non-digital items



For product thank-you page Message (HTML) and product thank-you Email Message:

[%vat_country%] = VAT place of supply for the item

[%vat_rate%] = VAT rate applicable for the item's place of supply



You may notice we do not report VAT amounts calculated for individual items; this is because VAT must be calculated on whole-order subtotals of item prices for each applicable VAT rate. Due to compound rounding errors, any sum of rounded VAT amounts for individual items may differ slightly from a VAT amount calculated on the sum of those items' prices, so the regulations mandate the latter method.

That would only be necessary if you want non-EU buyers to pay a lower price than EU buyers. If you're fine with everyone paying the same price worldwide, you can use the same buttons for everyone, and we'll only calculate what portion of that price constitutes VAT when the buyer is located in the EU.



If you do want to offer a lower price to non-EU buyers, we would recommend setting up separate sales pages/sections of your site, one with only EU buttons and the other with only non-EU buttons, so a buyer would need to select EU or non-EU to be directed to the appropriate sales page for their location. It may be possible to accomplish this automatically with custom scripting in your site, e.g. using GeoIP to determine the buyer's location; if you'd like some help setting that up, we can recommend the independent developers for hire here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/resources.htm

Yes, shipping destinations can only be restricted on an account-wide basis, so if you need different sets of destination restrictions, you would need separate accounts for those.