Thread

Never seen that before but how would that help in this situation? Not too sure what all that means anyway?

Not implying that this would help (I don’t know of UK VAT laws, btw) or further complicate things. But if you want to use SCM to associate a sales to a customer, it seems the amount paid PayPal reports in the callback notice will be compared with the sales price stored inside the SCM. And as mentioned, the check allows a difference of 10% if I am right (Derek might know better). So, you might have to keep in mind that adding or substracting a 17.5% VAT, the difference might get bigger than expected by the SCM and the sales might not be processed as intended.

Have a look at around line 628 in mod.simple_commerce.php and you’ll see what I refer to.

Perhaps, best would be to let the customer first choose this location and store two sets of item repositories (one with, one without VAT)  in the SCM - and tell the customer that he is required to select the right country. Moreover, isn’t there a further complication were companies (business customers) can give their VAT-ID and aren’t forced to pay VAT even if they are located in the EU?

Ah I remember that now. I think that is more incase you change the price of the item before you get back the IPN call to your site though isn’t it? Not too sure how that could be used though.

Regarding the VAT issue from what I have been told by our accountant and the way it usually works is that if a person / company that is VAT registered purchases something on your site they have to pay the full amount plus VAT. You then have to provide them with your VAT number and a proper VAT receipt and then they can use this to get the VAT back, as far as I know anway!

A bloomin’ minefield this one. Might be nice to find someone in the Tax office to come in and comment on this one 😉 but I don’t really think that would ever happen!! 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

There are pitfalls but I have managed to do this. here goes with an explanation:

First off you need to charge VAT to UK and EU BUT if the EU customer DOES have a VAT number then your VAT rate is ZERO for those customers. Paypal doesn’t ask for a VAT number or ask if the customer is VAT registered so this presents a problem.

You could ignore this problem and let Paypal handle the TAX. Although Paypal gives you an opportunity in your account settings, to put a VAT rate for different countries, you would need to go through every European country, including UK and put 17.5%.

Here is what I did:
First the customer registers and in that form you ask for a country (compulsory) and a VAT number - where appropriate.
Then when they are logged in you can charge VAT depending on the country. HOWEVER - I had to hack the ecommerce module to pass through the TAX rate to Paypal.

To determine if VAT is payable when knowing the EU country I used this in the template:

{if:elseif (country == 'Austria' OR country == 'Belgium' OR country == 'Bulgaria' OR country == 'Cyprus' OR country == 'Czech Republic' OR country == 'Denmark' OR country == 'Estonia' OR country == 'Finland' OR country == 'France' OR country == 'Germany' OR country == 'Greece' OR country == 'Hungary' OR country == 'Ireland' OR country == 'Italy' OR country == 'Latvia' OR country == 'Lithuania' OR country == 'Luxembourg' OR country == 'Malta' OR country == 'Netherlands' OR country == 'Poland' OR country == 'Portugal' OR country == 'Romania' OR country == 'Slovakia' OR country == 'Slovenia' OR country == 'Spain' OR country == 'Sweden') && vat_number==""}

The hack to the ecommerce module is not dramatic and I can send it to you if you want. The ecommerce tag looks like this after the hack:

{exp:simple_commerce:purchase entry_id="{entry_id}" success="http://www.yoursite.co.uk/software/download/{url_title}" cancel="http://www.yoursite.co.uk" currency="GBP" country_code="GB" tax="17.5"}

In other words the ‘tax’ parameter is new.

Also, if you want to get the details that come back from Paypal, I have a little plugin that makes some sense of the data that comes back and shows you the tax that has been paid on the transaction.

Hope that helps…

Hi Chris,

I sometimes wonder why I live in the UK. Just seems like everything is so much more difficult over here!!

Thanks for the explanation, would love to see the hack if that’s okay. The plugin sounds handy too if you don’t mind 😉

Thanks for everything on this.

Best wishes,

Mark

No guarantees of course, but you can grab this ZIP and they are both inside.

Happy to help

Chris

Hi Chris,

Thanks for that. Will download now and take a look at this later on. I have already modified the way the SCM works at the moment (not through hacks though) so will take a look at what you have there and see if I can incorporate any of it to what I am already doing.

Once again, thanks for the information, much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Mark

I’ve just read through this thread as I’m in a similar position. In my case my client has one product which they wish to quote on the site ‘inc VAT’ as it’s sold to individuals but there are also other products on the site which are sold to businesses so need to be quoted exc VAT but still have VAT added at checkout.

I’ve set up VAT (For the UK only) in PayPal (15%) and have then entered prices in the simple commerce module minus VAT. I’m planning to then put together a little plug-in which will accept a single parameter (price) and add the VAT for output into a page template.

@Chris: The Paypal plug-in you have written looks great, whilst I’ve not had a chance to try it, I can see it being very useful! You should also perhaps consider submitting your amendments to the simple commerce module to the EE team to see whether they could perhaps be included in the next release? 😊

This might be of interest to those of you following this thread, I wrote a small plug-in to dynamically add VAT/Tax to a price which is spat out by the simple commerce module so that you can set PayPal to add VAT itself, maintain non VAT prices in the simple commerce module and still have ‘plus VAT’ prices dynamically displayed on your website.

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/101741/