VAT and foreign websites
A lot of people reading this blog will be aware that the EU has a tax on non-essential items which, in the UK, is called Value-Added Tax, or VAT. The annoyance of VAT itself aside, it is a legal requirement for sites to support it when selling things for VAT-registered entities based in the EU. Now, usually this isn’t an issue, as sites selling things from the EU are usually built in the EU. Unfortunately, there’s this big site which is popular for some reason called eBay.
eBay doesn’t like VAT. When I say it doesn’t like it, I mean it doesn’t implement it properly. You see, eBay is a site which was launched in the U.S.A. and has since grown to other markets. This shows in the way it handles taxation.
For US listings, eBay has a really in-depth tax system in its API which allows you to specify tax levels on a per-state basis.
For EU listings, we have one field: VATPercent. This takes a floating-point number that tells the system to display a message on the listing that the list price contains VAT at the specified rate. This seems to be all it does.
When you buy an item with this VAT message on it from outside the EU, eBay still bills you the list price - it never deducts the VAT from the list price. Conversely, if you buy an item listed in the UK from the UK, the VAT is never added on, so that VATPercent field seems to only make eBay display the message that VAT is included in the list price.
Let’s not even begin to talk about getting support for this sort of problem, or even a clarification on how VAT works on eBay. I’ve been working on this auto-listing system for a month, and it still doesn’t work properly because every time I fix one issue, another one arises, and eBay’s developer support team will only answer the question you ask them, not volunteer answers to other problems which will appear in the future.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder how the entire system hasn’t collapsed under its own weight. The more I look at the API, the more I see a series of hackish attempts to attach some new functionality to previously-written hackish attempts to provide new functionality. They really need to break backwards-compatibility at some point and re-design it from scratch. Perhaps then we will actually be able to list things properly from outside that little conglomeration of nations at the top of the New World without having to fight the system at every step.
Now, don’t get me wrong; this isn’t something that just affects eBay, but it certainly is the most visible example of a site which must support VAT in order to do business in the EU and has implemented it in a way that is so bad as to almost be completely useless.
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