How do you handle vat when people order from different countries 
Author: Peter W.
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I am offering online products that are ordered from within the EU but also from the USA and other countries. I can set the VAT rate for sales to my own country (Germany at 16%), but most of the incoming orders are coming from the USA where I believe they do not have to pay sales tax when ordering from my website. I could not find any settings for varying the VAT rate based on the customer's country, all I found was a setting for differing shipping costs by country. As the product is digital, there are no shipping costs.
How can I best handle the VAT issue by country.
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Hello.
"I could not find any settings for varying the VAT rate based on the customer's country" - You're right.There are no such settings at the moment.
"How can I best handle the VAT issue by country." - It might be worth setting VAT 0 for all countries. But in delivery options, create several delivery options with different percentages for different countries.
Author
The problem is, I have to charge VAT to EU countries unless they provide a VAT-ID, then I do not charge VAT (Reverse charging). For other countries, it varies. As the software asks which country the user has, it should be programmed to handle the VAT as well, as otherwise we sellers could be breaking the tax laws with no possibility of doing it right.
Author
I looked in the delivery options and saw no possibility of setting percentages of the invoice as charges, just fixed amounts.
@ Peter
This issue should become an IDEA.
I know that this is an actual software's fault for you and many other webmasters - but maybe it would be considered more quickly by Incomedia (hmmm...) if you put this post as an IDEA-post?
Hello. I sent a notification about your question to the company employees, expect an answer from them here in the comments.
Hi Peter,
thank you for getting in touch.
I confirm that with a single e-commerce you can't set different VATs. You should create different projects reporting different settings.
Please let me know if I should set this message as Idea though.
Thanks! Kind regards.
Author
Considering international sales are a vital part of ecommence and the online shop is a major selling point of your Pro software, fixing this is urgent in my opinion, as it is currently not even suitable for sales within the EU, let alone international sales.
So yes, this is certainly an Idea that warrents urgent attention as being able to sell things online is an important aspect and it is a legal requiremment to be able to properly handle VAT.
Hi Peter,
I confirm I set this message as Idea.
Thanks! Kind regards.
This and other ecommerce issues is a weakness of X5.
One workaround that we use is that the customer can order products, pick their shipping method, and pick their payment method (credit card, wire transfer, check (or cheque), etc., and then they complete their order. We then contact them for payment, or they can contact us to offer payment details. Surprisingly no customer complaints - they are happy to pick what they want and then wait until we collect payment when it is ready to ship.
For us to collect payment immediately, X5 would have to expand the shopping cart database to include shipping dimension and weight for each item - and then offer live shipping integration to carriers through API - such as Fedex, UPS, etc.
We have such a site also - it uses an advanced shopping cart called CS-Cart, where all those things exist.
Example: X5 site: abthermal.com CS-cart site: firesleveusa.com
X5 would be a killer if it beefed up its shopping cart database, payment gateways and shipping gateways as it offers far superior landing page content control than most shopping carts.