Ability to enter EU VAT Number

[aengus]

Hi,

I will be selling products from the UK into the UK and the EU. All our products are charged VAT (Value Added Tax) at 20%, however we would like to provide the ability for a customer to enter an EU ‘Vat Number’ (as in, they are a company), and if they do enter one, any tax should be removed from their checkout before they purchase.

Some shopping carts use services like http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/ to actually validate that its a real VAT Number that has been entered, but I don’t need anything that sophisticated.

Ideally what I’m looking to do on the checkout page is to have a tickbox which says “I have an EU VAT number”, and then an input box where a customer can enter a VAT Number (e.g. string of text). If they then update their cart after ticking box and entering the VAT Number, taxation should be removed and they can check out as normal.

I’m fairly comfortable hacking sql/php, but as this EU tax compliance requirement is likely to be a common one, I thought I’d check here first and see if anyone has tried to implement this before

Kind regards,

Aengus

[wzp]

You could use a procedure, similar to what I’m going to describe. The beauty is that, for business procedure purposes, you can claim that you exercised due diligence.

1. Customer submits scanned copy of tax exemption certification.

2. Once you manually verify the certification, create a 20% coupon, using their tax exemption number as the coupon code.

You could then make the appropriate changes to eStore, changing the coupon code box into a tax ID box.

[usaipcg]

It would be good if you could add the feature as described above by AENGUS with the VAT check to see if it is a valid VAT Number.Your store is great but it really needs this to use the store for B2B in Europe.

[Author]

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