Feature Request: Integration of Taxamo assure into the checkout for UK companies selling to EU

[amanda_drury]

I'm not sure how to put in a features request - please can someone tell me if this way doesn't work.

I have been looking into how as a small business I can improve the experience for my EU customers of purchasing from myself, post Brexit as a UK business.

Royal Mail have recommended a company called Taxamo assure which acts as a IOSS. They calculate and charge the customer VAT and pay it to the EU on our behalf without us having to fill in the VAT return. They charge £2 for each transaction. It sounds like the perfect solution but unless you are a shopify plus business one cannot get access to the Shopify checkout and do the API integration. The irony is if you are a shopify plus customer you will be big enough and it will be more cost effective to set up your own IOSS.

I have spoken to support about this who have suggested that I put in a feature request. So here it is. If more people can also express an interest in this feature it may have more chance of being implemented and go somewhere to ease the Brexit headache of doing business with the EU.

[Nitsa]

UPS ? Please give me a break, don't answer emails, don't acknowledge anything beyond a "do not reply" response, check out the trust pilot reviews. Look at me, 20 days and counting and I sill can't get packages out of Frankfurt, see attached file. DPD, Royal Mail, at least they engage with you, UPS is like a black hole....

[Candi_Q]

Hi All,

I had success with my delivery of a parcel to an Irish customer. It took a bit longer than usual to arrive but when it did there was no additional charges to the customer and I can confirm the IOSS symbol was present on my Click and Drop postage label.

So is there a trend with particular European countries that are having issues with double VAT charges?

Also is anyone else being completely ignored by Crossborderit? I applied for my IOSS number through them and it shows up in my Crossborderit account but I have been emailing for weeks and not had a single response! I am unable to upload my CSV file (constant error response) and I have requested the Private app link but hae not received it. Not sure how I am supposed to upload the VAT data as requested by Crossborderit at this point.

[Andrei_S]

After uploading the CSV file we receive the error saying 'Source Country must be outside EU'. The inputted source country is GB which is outside the EU.. 

[Dbaca]

Can you e-mail IT support …suport@crossborderit.com
CC damon@crossborderit.com

[Beck_Prior]

In addition from Taxamo:

We appreciate that Shopify is one of the main platforms out there, our developers need to concentrate on the Magento integration at the moment.

We have noted your interest in the Shopify plugin, and again you can be reassured that we have noted your interest and we will contact you when the Shopify plugin has been created.

We do not know yet when this will be taken into consideration; it will be a business decision to see which will be the next platform to be taken into consideration.

You can build a custom integration by using the Taxamo API; for that, you would need to avail yourself of the services of a developer of your choice.

As Taxamo created the Assure product as a self-service model, we are happy to share with you all material available, including our developer guide, FAQs, and API reference.
Overview
General
Billing
Shipping & Returns
https://docs.assure.taxamo.com/docs/transaction-object

[Dbaca]

Our Shopify APP is ready. I will upload all the data without needing to do it manually. 

You will need to have your IOSS number from us. Then E-mail support@crossborderit.com with your Shopify Domain and we will build you a private link. 

In a few weeks when the public APP is working you will need to switch from the private app to the public one which will have more functionality. 

[Fanattik]

Could be a problem.

We have used the IOSS number and had an email this morning from a Spanish customer saying that he was charged the VAT, even though we used CROSSBORDERIT. Do you think this was just a mistake by the Spanish post office, what do we do when this happens because the customer wants us to pay him back the VAT we charged him. How do we get the money back from CROSSBORDERIT when this sort of thing happens?

[LauraECY]

Hi, we have had this with 2 customers. I think it was an issue with Royal
Mail. We had written the IOSS no on the parcel, attached a Commercial
Invoice detailing the tax paid by the customer and none of that seemed to
have been taken into account. The first person I spoke to at Royal Mail
said it sounded like a customs issue and then disconnected the call as I
was explaining why it shouldn't have been.
I then spoke to the Click and Drop team who said their latest update should
have fixed the issue. After discussing it with our accountant we refunded
the customer who provided proof of having paid that amount to receive the
parcel and will exclude the transaction from the CBIT upload. I don't think
the UK and EU postal services were in any way ready for this and so the
implementation has been tricky. We are desperately hoping that the bugs
have been ironed out now.

[Curb_Wear]

I had the same issue with the IOSS logo not showing on a shipment going to Sweden, Click and Drop advisor told me this was just a label error, but like you mention it seems none of the postal services are ready and businesses are left to pick up the cost or extra work to try and reclaim any taxes paid twice.

[Boo14]

Re the Click and Drop labels, I agree that there seems to be a problem with the IOSS number not auto-filling on some of them, so double-check your printouts! Further to my post the other day, we sent the French customer two parcels from separate despatch locations, one got there fine and he was not asked to pay anything and the other (which was rejected, as he didn't want to pay tax), we now think was missing the IOSS number on the CN22 generated by Click and Drop! Really frustrating! 

[LauraECY]

Apparently (according to the Click and Drop customer services) if the IOSS
symbol is on the address label the EORI and IOSS numbers on the CN22 are
not required. It all seems a bit of a risk and we won't know for a couple
of weeks if there are any charges!

[Boo14]

@LauraECY Thanks for this. What is the IOSS symbol? I have not seen this on Click and Drop?? We are in the process of setting up a business account, as we used Drop and Go before, so are having to do everthing manually via a Personal C&D Account at the mo! Thanks.

[LauraECY]

[image: image.png]
We are only using Click and Drop for EU orders as we want to continue
supporting our Post Office using Drop and Go.
Considering that the electronic customs information is supposed to be the
important step it seems ridiculous that this tiny symbol can make a
difference!

[Boo14]

Hi @LauraECY Thanks. Unfortunately I can't see the attachment on your message? I'll have a look at Click & Drop too see if I can find something. We are using both D&G and C&D at the moment, too. 

[LauraECY]

Sorry about that, I'll try again!    

[Boo14]

Thanks for that Laura. I have just looked back and re-generated the paperwork of some past orders and can see that only one (23rd July) has that symbol on it. I had noticed the IOSS number had not printed on that one, so hand-wrote it on myself. I'm just concerned about the one before that! Fingers crossed. Thanks again. 🙂

[Morning]

That tallies with Click & Drop being updated on the 22nd. The IOSS number shouldn't be visible on the address label or CN22 label though. Unless it's the number of an online marketplace like Ebay or Amazon, it needs to be kept secret.

[Boo14]

Thanks. That's interesting. It was auto-printing out on our first few labels since 1st July. That must be why they have switched to the symbol! I will let our other despatch unit know!

[LauraECY]

That is really good to know thanks. Do you know why it has to be secret? Is
it to avoid others getting hold of the number to use fraudulently? I
assumed it was similar to the VAT no which is quite public.

[Morning]

It needs to be secret because otherwise anyone could use it for a package, and that owner of that number would have to pay the VAT.

One of the July 22nd C&D updates was to stop the number appearing on the labels, as it had been in certain cases.

[Nitsa]

Has anyone scanned the QR code to see if it appears there? The "kept secret" bit bothers me, how would EU customs know it's a genuine IOSS label otherwise?

[Morning]

It's not in the QR code, it's in the electronic data that precedes a package arriving in the EU. The number is checked by customs against the EU-wide database. If it's valid, if the package value isn't over 150 euro, and it doesn't contain excise goods, the package will be released from customs for delivery.

Edit: Removed a bit about online marketplace numbers as I don't think it was correct.

[Candi_Q]

Can anyone share a screenshot of how they have their CSV files set up and have successfully uploaded to Crossborderit?

Thanks in advance!

[LauraECY]

The support address is not very responsive but Damon has been quite helpful.

It took a lot of playing around with the format to get it to upload accurately. I have to admit I was hoping that we would have the private app this week so that I don't have to do another manual upload. 
I finally got it to work by creating the table and then concatenating the values with ; in between each value. I then copied the values only into a separate file and saved that as a CSV file. There was an issue with the date format not pulling through properly as it looks like a sum but if you have ' before the date it should. (Apologies if any of this is teaching to suck eggs!)

[Candi_Q]

Hi @LauraECY 

This is so helpful thank you! I just learned a new word 'Concatenating' lol.  I will give it a go now.

In addition to the IOSS file did you upload a product file as mentioned in Crossborderit's FAQ section?

Thanks 🙂 

[LauraECY]

Our product catalogue is enormous so we haven't done so. If it turns out
that we need to then I will but for now I am focussing on having the orders
in!

[LauraECY]

Just a quick FYI - I had the date format wrong. I'm sure you will spot this when you upload but the format needs to be yyyy-mm-dd

[Candi_Q]

Hi @LauraECY ,

Yes thank you. After a bit of fiddling it is finally uploaded successfully. Thank you for your help! If you didn't send that screenshot I would still be completely lost. You're a star!

[Dbaca]

Yes if people have you IOSS they can ship causing the VAT responsibility to shit to Crossborderit and to the customer.

[SMU]

Hi

Is the IOSS symbol generated automatically if we enter our IOSS number  on click and drop? Sorry, I may have missed this info earlier in the thread.

[Candi_Q]

Hi @SMU 

Yes if you enter your IOSS number into your Click and Drop account under the setting section called 'Trading Names' it should automatically print an IOSS symbol on your postage labels. I would recommend checking each label to confirm as some people on here have mentioned it not showing up on some occasions. 

[GuyWilliams]

Has anyone run into trouble with 0,00 EUR transactions?  We ship ~5-10 replacement units a day at no cost to the customer and since pre July 1 they were under the 22 EUR threshold they just went DDU.  A twist in IOSS is that it's not just collecting VAT, it's collecting duty (HTS) as well so even a 0 EUR item still has underlying "value" that could be dutiable.  What's happening is that neither Taxamo nor CBIT (we use both... long story) can process IOSS for a 0 EUR transaction so the orders ship DDU and some customers are getting charged really high amounts and getting justifiably annoyed (remember this was already a customer with a problem!)  What are we supposed to do in this scenario?

[Candi_Q]

Hi @GuyWilliams 

Is it possible to just send it as a commercial sample?

[GuyWilliams]

@Candi_Q Sure, that's OK for one's and twos but it's probably not compliant- it's not actually a sample after all.  Fact is, our 3PL tells us that no one is really sure what is (or is not) compliant so maybe I'll just go ahead and do it.  What a mess

[Candi_Q]

Hi @GuyWilliams 

It really is a mess. I hope you get some clear answers soon!