Taxes for different regions
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M
Marcel Guerero
Recently launched a membership site but Memberstack's flat fee applies worldwide, including members who are outside the EU / UK, this isn't ideal.
Please provide a way to recognise or choose the country of payment for members upon payment.
So that members outside of EU / UK don't get charged for VAT, (but EU / UK members should be charged VAT).
Duncan Hamra
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Good news! This is now possible in Memberstack 2.0 by using Stripe taxes 馃コ
https://docs.memberstack.com/hc/en-us/articles/7406298400283-Stripe-Taxes
Duncan Hamra
planned
Josh Lopez
Maybe integrate something like http://www.octobat.com/ or https://www.quaderno.io/ that work with stripe for dynamic VAT calculations. This comes from a post on twitter https://twitter.com/rroudt/status/1344003946248101895
Duncan Hamra
Hi Marcel 馃憢 Thank you for this.
We'll need to decide if we rely on a 3rd party service to handle this for us, or if we want to tackle the problem more like Stripe checkout... https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/taxes
We're making updates now in Memberstack 2.0 that will make this easier going forward. I'll keep you updated here.
2 follow up questions:
- What will happen if this goes unsolved?
- How useful is this feature to you without support for multiple currencies?
M
Marcel Guerero
Duncan Hamra:
Hi Duncan,
- I would possibly need to issue VAT refunds to Non-EU customers using coupons or worst case, we would have to look at other membership/billing systems.
- Don't think we would need multiple currencies.
Ideally, there should be a way to automatically detect the country of origin, through IP or a dropdown, then apply the regional tax.
Thanks.
T
Tim Schmidt
Duncan Hamra: Personally, I would rely on a 3rd party service. I have done business in 42 countries, lived in South America and Ireland. The tax structures in Europe alone are crazy - then add in states like California, Massachusetts, New York that are always vying for more tax dollars at the state, county, and city level and you have a full-time business just doing that.
Duncan Hamra
Tim Schmidt: This sort of perspective is oh so useful! Do you mind if I reach out again when we get into solving this issue? In the meantime, I'll start adding potential 3rd party services to this post for future reference.
Cris
Duncan Hamra: if this is a voting question, I choose integrating Stripe checkout. It is essential to display the tax on checkout in the Memberstack popup (I've seen the Stripe API that delivers the tax calculation needs minimal settings).
It might be that the 'one-time-payment' memberships on Memberstack have to be represented as product purchases on Stripe.
The EU rules on e-commerce are always changing and Stripe looks to adopt them rather fast and reliable. This is a good reference to learn about EU VAT https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/vat-e-commerce_en