Issues that we’ve had (most are just a general IOSS mess or Recharge related, not CBIT specifically)
-Recharge accepting non verifiable addresses with incorrect country codes (Like Munich but in Afghanistan because it’s the first country on the country list)- also some related issue with “Deutschland” not equating to “Germany” and EU countries generally not having “state.” These break everything and have required a lot of complicated support from Recharge.
-Recharge not calculating (or correctly calculating) VAT via Avalara (we have a lot of these)
-French (or other) local post just “deciding” that IOSS wasn’t properly applied and charging fines… no recourse, just mad customers
-0 EUR items are a nightmare (we send out a lot of replacement stock). Don’t forget that IOSS also deals with duty and a 0 EUR item still has an underlying dutiable value! CBIT simply can’t deal with this because it works from the cart total not the underlying product value like Taxamo does. So, we now send out all replacements at a 90% off discount and manually capture 0 EUR payment so that we can pay duty
-Random purchases form non CBIT provisioned stores Somehow we get EU customers that find their way to my AU and CA stores and buy in the wrong language and wrong currency and then ship to the EU. Not many of these but they are head scratchers when they happen.
What are we doing?
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Filing for a direct intermediary via Deloitte (but the filings via our UK 3pl will still be special)
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Opening a NL 3pl location (partner to our UK 3PL) to ship under the non-existent OSS. When OSS happens we’ll have operations under our NL VAT- may need to set up an entity as well but there is some time there. Most of my volume is really low value, so the 1EUR + VAT fees are brutal to my margins.
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We built a crazy complicated API for Taxamo calculations and then had to bin it because of the discount issue. But we still run the calculations independently and are validating what CBIT is doing ourselves.