If you cannot provide a list of sales by country, you maybe should not be running a business.
This is not a cash sale in a local book store.
the significant problem is now the fact that I have to register for VAT domestically if I want to to sell to people in other EU countries
before if my turnover was below ~£70,000 I paid no VAT at all due to the exemption (giving me a competitive edge vs. big companies with better economies of scale)
after the new regulations if I make any EU sales I have to either fill in VAT returns for EU member state I've sold to (not feasible, that would be hundreds of VAT returns/year in many languages), or register for domestic VAT which will handle that for me, but kills my business model
the EU Commission doesn't see this as a significant problem, likely as it is a beneficiary of VAT (the VAT being an EU mandated tax)
having less turnover or income than the value at which you move above the zero rate band is not evasion
low income people aren't evading taxes by not earning enough to be liable to pay them
previously when I had a new idea that I might be able to turn into a business I could form a limited liability company for about £10, try the idea out with essentially no paperwork at all
then if the idea panned out I could worry about the huge-pain-in-the-ass-that-is-VAT later
now with this regulation it's a problem once I've made my first sale to a non-domestic EU customer, and my agility goes through the floor
EU countries have gone from being fantastic places to start a digital services micro-company to being at best mediocre ones, all to try to stop Amazon avoiding VAT
utter madness: small companies started as side projects turn into the big ones, but apparently we no longer want that
Well, so how do we deal with Amazon avoiding VAT and still being fair to all players on the market, big and small?
There are two hard parts to what the EU did, for businesses.
The first is you have to charge variable VAT rates and remit the collected tax. However VAT rates do vary not only by country but in some cases within countries too, and they do change, so you have to make sure you have a really up to date list of tax rates and geographies where they apply. Including varying rates down to the city levels.
But the real kicker is that you can't trust the user's claim about where they are. Users are financially incentivised to lie about their location because these are digital downloads. So if they claim to live in a low VAT region they pay less, but download the same files. Simple as that.
As a consequence the VAT regulations have a LOT of complicated edge cases and "guidance" in them about how to figure out where the user really is, not where they say they are. This is hard of course, the user may be using VPNs and so on. There is specific guidance on how to handle users who are on ships sailing between VAT regions, or planes that are in the air when a purchase is made. So you've got a really complex pile of logic to start with, and then you're also in an adversarial situation where the users are all trying to screw you over by forging their location. And if they succeed, you can suffer big fines.
Oh and finally of course, you can't use any technical tricks to figure out where the user actually is, because then you'd violate EU privacy laws ... have fun with all of this! In practice it has to all be outsourced, it is too much work to implement in house for all but the largest of firms.