Should I be charging VAT?

[only944]

I have been looking online for this answer and I can't figure it out. I live in California and ship my items from my house. I ship mostly in the USA but I have been doing business all over the world. I have my account setup to only charge sales tax to people that live in CA. Should I also be charging VAT to people that live in those countries? I would guess not but I can't really figure it out.

[E-junkie_Ninja]

Usually a U.S. resident would not have to charge sales tax or VAT to buyers in other countries. However, you would really want to speak to a tax expert in your area to find out for certain who your should and should not be charging.

[E-junkie_Guru]

I found a couple pages of relevance to this matter:

http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/VATon_E-Commerce_Directive

http://ec.europa.eu/taxationcustoms/taxation/vat/traders/e-commerce/article_1610_en.htm



From that, it appears that the EU expects non-EU merchants to collect and pay VAT on export sales to individual (non-business) buyers in EU countries (EU business buyers are expected to calculate and pay their own VAT liability on import purchases); however, compliance with this is apparently voluntary, and it's not clear how they would reasonably expect to enforce non-compliance for merchants located outside EU jurisdiction. We'd recommend consulting with a qualified tax professional if you have further questions or concerns about this.



That said, if you want our cart to calculate VAT for EU buyers, just go into Seller Admin > Sales Tax/VAT, checkmark Charge VAT, and select your location as United States. Then make sure you enable Sales Tax/VAT in the settings of each product that should charge tax. You appear to have a lot of products, so if you don't already have Sales Tax/VAT enabled for them, we can enable that for all your products across the board for you; just email your request to Support along with your E-junkie account password, or your Subscription ID (from your Seller Admin > Account Summary screen), or your original activation code (from the original "Account information" email we sent you at registration).:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php