Sorry, I added this comment to a closed post on the VAT issue... so now I open a new thread to talk about this...
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Taking into account that the VAT thing is something all those selling to or from any EU country would need to take care of, I think it makes some sense trying to figure out a way to deal with it (which btw, I think it would be an excellent feature for MS-Suite to gain market in Europe, where Drupal community is very strong).
Summing up, there are mainly to ways to deal with VAT:
- As an EU seller. The seller only taxes VAT for other EU buyers, no matter the original country of the buyer. Buyers out of EU are not taxed. The tax level is that of the seller's country
- As a seller outside EU selling to EU buyers. The tax level is that of the country of each buyer.
I guess a good approach could be to manage this in a country oriented fashion. In the settings page, add a "use advanced VAT" setting, where you can also specify if you as a seller are located inside or outside EU, and a tax value to be applied if inside. If that option is activated, just ask the buyer where he is from, with a country field, during registry or checkout, and then modify prices accordingly (and save them to same place). It would be easy to have a mini table (or some variables) to store some EU countries and their VAT values (which should be configured by the seller at the time of setting up the suite). As the added taxes would be easily associated to the country where they are dued, reporting, and later payment to authorities would be very easy.
One can argue that asking the buyer where he is from seems not enough to prevent fraud. But buyers are always enforced in the terms of the site to reflect true data, so if there is some fraud in the provided info, it is not the seller's fraud, but the buyer's.
I am not a coder (though I can mostly read it) but it does not look a very heavy task to do. Maybe the need to enforce that country field before checkout... and I think it would help to boost MS-Suite sales in EU
What do you think, Leighton?
There are some good ideas here, I'll write them down and see if we can get it implemented in a future version.
One issue is that not all modules ask the user for their address (PayPal WPS for example) on the site. So we would need to add a field on the Checkout Page that asks the user for their Country, and then adds the appropriate VAT tax as applicable to the order - before the user continues with Checkout.
I'll give this some more thought...
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting