Is shopify really not usabe for EU and Switzerland?

Jens6
Visitor
1 0 0

Is shopify really not usabe for EU and Switzerland?
Simple example:
A product is sold for 20 Euro end customer price in the EU.
It has to be including tax in the shopify backend to that the correct tax can be shown by country like:
20 € incl. 19% tax in Germany
20 € incl. 20% tax in Austria

But for Switzerland 16,81 € without tax. Not 119% like Germany but only 100% in Switzerland.

There is no way to calculate the tax out of the end price in checkout so that it gets cheaper, so it is not usable for EU and Switzerland.

Why?

Replies 3 (3)

Nick
Shopify Staff (Retired)
4531 434 1024

Hi Jens, 

Nick here from Shopify. 

I completely understand where you are coming from here. Swiss taxes aren't as conducive to other taxes and can make the tax set up process a little more complicated at times. There are however ways around this to include Switzerland and other countries where there are different or no taxes. The best way is via a tax override or exemption. What it does is enables you to override tax rates to control how much tax you charge for a particular product, and to handle exceptions and exemptions. You can also specify unique tax rates for shipping destinations or to tax-exempt customers. Shopify has a helpful guide which goes into this in more detail which you can see here

There are also a couple of apps which could be worth your while looking into to help you with the invoicing side of this called Sufio and Digital Takeout: Easy Invoice. While they may not be able to directly fix what you're looking to do in full, they still might be of use in the grand scheme of things. 

Hopefully, this helps and gives you direction on how to approach this going forward. Please don't hesitate to reach out and ask any other questions should you have any. 

All the best, Nick

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

tilus
Tourist
8 0 5

I am sorry but this information is still unusable, and therefor i may have to cancel my webshop 24 hours before officially announced launch date.
This is pretty terrible.

I will explain why.

All your efforts setting up tax zones and tax exempt products is useless because webshop in europe has to be able to show prices on product pages with tax added. Shopify can not do this! It wants to add taxes instead of deducting them.
Therefor it seems 100% useless and dangerous in Europe!
Please explain how can you let stores run this way and why have you not fixed this in the last few YEARS!

I am terrified and feel completely cheated now. I have spent 2 weeks setting up everything not checking this most basic option. Now i got to start it all over again and loosing revenue meanwhile.
How could this possibly even happen? I have even paid for this sh*t.

Should i hire an expert as your page suggests? Hell no, without clarification that it can be done 100% according to local laws.
I would rather pay someone to build a shop for me elsewhere instead.

At this point i would like an official statement from the product manager, a complete solution about the state of your product in Europe or full money back and compensation of the losses i will suffer in the next weeks.

Feel free to email me at attila@racewerk.com for a solution asap.

 

seltzdesign
Visitor
2 0 0

It's now 5 years later and still a problem. I believe swiss customers are systematically overcharged by EU shops since they do not deduct the VAT, which they don't have to pay when sendind to Switzerland.

I think one way around this would be to be able to set up a tax exemption using a negative value. So that for example a shop located in germany can set up a "tax" for Switzerland of -19%. That way all prices could remain including VAT for all EU countries and get reduced by the german VAT just for Switzerland.

 

Is that possible?