How do the EU VAT changes affect me?

Overview

On January 1st, 2015, the EU changed the rules of how merchants must track and apply value added tax (VAT). The new policy requires that suppliers of digital products and services calculate taxes based on the consumer's EU member state, and furnish evidence of the consumer's location to the tax authorities.

We wanted to share some of the information we've gathered regarding the EU VAT policy changes to save you time. Please keep in mind we are not tax or legal professionals, and we highly recommend you work with an accredited consultant to fully comply with all standards.

For more information, please refer to this gov.uk article

Customer Information You'll Need

FetchApp does not collect VAT relevant information, instead this information is typically collected within your shopping cart (e.g. Shopify, PayPal, Bigcommerce). For security and simplicity purposes, we do not store, for example, the customer billing address or IP information in FetchApp.

Different ecommerce systems have varying levels of support for determining and supplying VAT information. According to the EU policy, two of the following pieces of order information are necessary as proof of the customer's location:

• the billing address of the customer
  
• the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the device used by the customer
  
• customer’s bank details
  
• the country code of SIM card used by the customer
  
• the location of the customer’s fixed land line through which the service is supplied
  
• other commercially relevant information (for example, product coding information which electronically links the sale to a particular jurisdiction)