# Selling Samples in your own online shop in the EU (VAT problem)



## samy (Mar 7, 2016)

Hello guys,

my question is a bit different from the normal stuff we discuss here, but I am quite sure some of you might have encountered similar problems. 
Since 2015 there is a new VAT rule in the EU. There is already a thread in this forum from a year ago: http://www.vi-control.net/community/threads/new-eu-vat-rules.42778/ 
The new rule basically says that the seller has to pay the taxes in the country from the buyer when the sale happens in the EU. Normally the seller should register at every EU country where sales have been made, but this is for a small company almost impossible. So there is this "One-Stop-EU Web Portal" where one can register all sales in the EU and pay the taxes quaterly, but this again seems like quite some bureaucratic effort. What this also means is that one has different VAT pecentages for every country and the problems with that has been already discussed in the thread mentioned above (like how to track the country of the buyer, how to display the proper VAT...)

So my problem at the moment is, that I am planning on selling my own samples and presets. I wanted to do this in my own webshop on my website, which would be no problem from a technical point of view. But this whole legal stuff freaks me out. 
I also did some research about other smaller sample companies in the EU and a lot of them seem not to do this VAT thing right (or even have the legal requierments to run a web shop like a proper contact adresse or policies). It seems to me they just ignore it. But for me this can`t be the solution.

Does any of you have experiences in this field and could give me some advice how to do this best?

An alternative I thought about is, to sell the samples over an existing webshop. But I don`t know which one to choose and also have no experiences in this field. If you can give me some advice for that too, I would be really grateful.

Thanks!
Samy


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## d.healey (Mar 7, 2016)

I had the same dilemma, I'd coded a good website and then they brought in these new rules which threw up a ton of new coding challenges for me if I was to do it myself. The first place I looked at was Gumroad - check them out - they will handle all the VAT stuff and if you're under your country's VAT threshold you won't even need to register for VAT.

In the end I didn't use Gumroad, I decided to rebuild my website using wordpress and woocommerce and bought some plugins that allow me to handle all the EU VAT stuff (from the web shop point of view). I registered my company for VAT and joined the VATMOSS scheme, every so often (I think it's once a quarter) I have to fill out some online forms for VAT, it takes 10-30 minutes to do depending on how many of my sales are in the EU. The biggest downside to the whole thing is now my customers have to pay VAT which pushes the price up, and they can't see the final price they'll have to pay until they've entered their address.


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## lucky909091 (Mar 24, 2016)

I know this issue as a buyer of VSTis.
Some shop software recognizes my VAT ID number and automatically subtracts the VAT, but some online shops do not even have a declaration of VAT.
These are the ones where I have to pay the full price despite my EU tax ID.

When doing the annual tax declaration there is regularly discomposure with my tax accountant.


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