Product price changes due to diff tax rates. Is it just me or is this crazy???

[Jonathan_Maher]

I run a store based in Italy and we've been selling all over Europe since 2017.

The following has never been a problem for us before - perhaps it started after Brexit when we all started registering for VAT in the UK, perhaps the new OSS situation....

The prices of products on our website are changing according to the local VAT rate in your country.  Not only that - they change even when we view our website in our own country.  So if for example we have a product that actually costs (including tax) €98 - we are seeing the price on our website as €96,40.

So a few things are totally wrong here in my opinion.  

Firstly, we never put our prices with cents - we're not selling groceries and it doesn't look good on a site.

Secondly, the setting of a price is a hugely important tool for a store owner - so for the system to be adjusting our end price, in my opinion is crazy.

After having spoken several times with Shopify support about whether this is correct - they tell me it is due to the fact that we have the setting in 'Taxes' set to include or exclude taxes based on your customer's country'.....and as the setting states ' will use the customer's local tax rate for calculations'.  

here's the bit that doesn't make sense to me - surely you should keep the end product price the same - just adjust the amount of tax being charged???  Personally I don't want my prices being played around with - play around with the tax rate, not the price.

I;'ve searched around these forums and I can't find anybody posting about this issue - so I'm asking myself whether I have got this wrong somehow?  How come nobody else is having this problem?

Would love to hear other store owners perspective on this!

Thanks

[ShipAntdotcom]

Currently EU charges VAT for all the packages ship to EU countries, however, each country VAT rates are different from 19% to 28%. If we still need to sell to EU countries we will need to add at least 25% tax to the product price, as long as the products have enough profits, you can set a fixed rates like 25% or 30%, you can export your orders in the EU countries to analaysis the orders on different countries and decide the fixed tax rates, the top countries should be Germany, France, NL, BE, Spain, UK, no need to make it complicated to meet different tax rates in different countries.

[visuelles]

For us - running a shop in the EU with OSS taxation activated, and only using the buy button, not the shopify shop frontend - this was the solution:

There is a misleading option in the taxes section of your shop's settings:

”Include or exclude tax based on your customer's country”

If this option is activated the prices start to vary based on the VAT % of the user's country. In the calculation of the final price in the checkout shopify first deducts your local standard VAT, then adds the user's local VAT to this price. Very confusing.

If this option is deactivated your products' price will stay the same regardless of the VAT % - only the VAT amount displayed in the checkout process will vary.

Hope this helps.

[Roelfje]

Alright, but here's the thing. I'm planning to sell to both EU countries and a few non-EU countries (Norway, Switzerland and the UK). For the EU countries, I want one fixed price (including VAT) despite differences in the VAT rate -

BUT

for the other three countries I don't want to charge VAT and leave that part up to the customer and their customs agencies. 

In short, I'm running into the exact same issue as ShipAntdotcom. It seems really, really weird that Shopify would start adjusting prices when I have specifically set those prices under my products. 

Any way around this?

[Panta2]

we were ready to migrate our shops from Magento to Shopify but now we encountered this issue.

We are based in Italy and we sell products both to EU customers and extra-EU customers.

End prices must not change in the EU market, especially in our sport sector where producers set very specific RRP and we must respect them.

Waiting for a solutions on our side as well.