Global expansion, localizing content, and selling in multiple currencies and languages
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.
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Hi @Christian48
I understand that you don't have Registration Based Taxes setup on your store at this time. If you are selling to the UK/EU this will be an important step for you to complete. Depending on your tax setup you had on your store when we rolled this feature out, you may not have been automatically opted in for it. If that is the case you will want to contact our live support and let them know that you need to enable "Registration Based Taxes" on your store. From there, they can reach out to the appropriate support teams internally to get that feature enabled (Feel free to share this forum post for context). You can also see more information on this here: Manage Your UK Taxes.
To contact our live support please follow this link: Shopify Help Center - Contact Support, sign into your store account, search for your issue and use the contact support button at the bottom of the search results to see all our live support options.
As @Savvy_Paul shared in their screenshots, registration based taxes allows you to provide your tax registration ID for the appropriate countries/states/provinces you sell to and uses our automated tax system to check the appropriate tax and apply it at the checkout. After July 1st, this will be updated to include your OSS/IOSS registration information to capture taxes on orders that meet the specific threshold requirements put in place by Brexit.
In regards to the integration of an external services to work as your intermediary for businesses using the IOSS model, I want to reiterate that your feedback here is being shared with the appropriate teams.
I know that while IOSS registration is not mandatory, the simplification of the checkout experience it provides is definitely the ideal option for businesses with a lot of sales to the UK/EU. At this time, because IOSS is not a legal requirement Shopify does not provide a built in integration for an IOSS intermediary.
Based on the information that has been shared in this thread, Taxamo does offer an integration solution but that is restricted to our PLUS store plans as it requires access to the checkout API. If there are other options available for this integration, the ability to offer it is entirely in Taxamo's, or any external providers, hands to create. They have full access to our API documentation and can develop and list their app in our app store. If they require any support from our developers, that is something handled by a team outside of my own and I am not able to provide additional insight into that process on the back end. Shopify does not control the integration of third party apps and services and if you would like to have features provided by a third party company (Like Taxamo), you will need to contact them directly to ask them to create a suitable app integration.
I am going to mark this response as the "Solution" to make it easier for other merchants to see the information shared here. Please feel free to continue sharing your feedback and I will answer any questions I am able to.
Thank you!
-Shay
Shay | Social Care @ Shopify
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European companies can take advantage of SEPA payments. This means a bank transfer similar to domestic bank transfer. Which in turn means the cost is minimal to zero in most cases. In case of European transfers paying 3% when there is an actually free solution easily available I don't understand.
For companies outside of EU especially the new online banking solutions provide additional, cost-efficient global money transfers.
So yes, a fee is a fee. Necessary or not.
Thanks for sharing about EAS.
I'm currently with Crossborderit and when I asked them for alternatives to their service once they informed me they were upping their prices they conveniently didn't mention EAS.
Try EAS, I have connected to them and I am very happy about their approach and services . I have spoken to all the three , so my experience is:
1. Crossborderit is much more expensive and they have little idea about the Shopify settings and complicated VAT situations (we sell both from EU and deliver to EU from outside EU).
2. Eurora is expensive and they gave me wrong advice on sales via channels. They also will not support the installation and have a monthly fee of 50 EUR
3. EAS fully supported us during installation , helped with tax settings and location settings. All was done within 2 days from my application. They are the least expensive solution - no monthly payments and only 1.25 EUR per transaction
Great to hear some good feedback regards EAS. We are currently looking at shipping outside EU as we stopped since Brexit. We were seriously considering CrossBorderIt but glad we didnt install that looking at the current prices. Our ECom web designer has suggested EAS or Taxdoo. Taxdoo rates look high but EAS sounds reasonable.
I also talked with EAS and will soon start shipping to the EU again after stopping following the imposition of new VAT rules. I note other posts stating similar intentions. Previously Germany was a good market for us and most likely for other sellers as well who may be unaware of the changes to German packaging laws since June 2022 that affect any seller sending goods to Germany, no matter how small a seller you are. It applies also to the product packaging as well as the shipping packaging. Even people with craft items on sites like Etsy are affected by this. If you don't comply with the regulations and are not registered with the authorities your package will be returned with all the problems that that entails. You can wade through tons of detail on various websites and get depressed by it all but I found a quite useful guide to it here. Hope this helps someone:-)
Thanks for flagging this - we had no idea about the German Packaging laws! We ship to Germany regularly so today we sorted our registration on LUCID (easier than expected despite some strange German-English translations of words/meanings!) and also signed up with RECLAY to pay our packaging licence fee. Very easy and instant process....relieved and surprised!
For anyone that's worried about extra costs of entering this minefield...registration with the governing organisation LUCID is free.
Registration with one of the 'dual system' partners (they are the companies who collect and process the recycled packaging materials in Germany and who you pay the 'packaging' licence fees to) was also easy.
Prices vary significantly - you can go to their websites and enter in data about how many KG's of paper/cardboard/plastic etc. you might ship into Germany and they give you a price immediately on screen without you having to pay/commit to them as your chosen 'licence fee partner'.
We checked out a few of the 'dual system' companies prices for comparison and found RECLAY to be the best...so we went with them. All in English, super easy process.
We rounded up our estimate for 2023 to 23kg of paper/cardboard + 1 kg plastic we paid €14.89 for the year. If you monitor your parcels (especially if you're getting underway with IOSS and expect to ship more to Germany in the future) you can add supplementary 'licences' and top up your payments at any time.
What is key is that the amounts you enter into your 'dual system' licence fee partner must also be entered into the LUCID system too and they must match. You are responsible for entering the info into both systems. The LUCID system is the central database of all the info - this is I guess where the customs people look you up to check you're legit.
Allow yourself a couple of hours to work your way through it.
More useful info on all of this is here too https://packhelp.co.uk/german-packaging-act/
Thanks guys and @LauraECY. I appreciate there will be many here who decide Germany is not worth the effort, and there are no doubt many of the same opinion in the rest of the EU, as the rules apply equally to them, not to mention China and the US. So if you do make the effort you might find less competition and more demand for your products than previously:-)
Rules are getting more stringent in EU and the authorities have been learning from their mistakes. One has to follow the rules to be compliant on this huge market. We expect that IOSS will become mandatory soon and it is best that everyone starts using this special scheme now while it is still optional . But it is not always that the rules become more complicated for non-EU operators. For example, single VAT registration will make everyone's life much easier.
I use the easproject for these purposes. They charge one euro for each transaction, besides they set up a store for me for free. Too customer-oriented!
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