Comment by chestnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chestnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

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"There's probably plenty of reasons why no European PhD dropouts started a successful search company, but cross border e-commerce isn't one of them."

For digital goods and services, cumbersome VAT rules do make cross-border e-commerce more difficult. The recent new rules on digital goods where VAT is applied based on the location of the buyer means merchants now have to deal with different VAT rates for 28 EU nations. I can see the rationale for such an approach, and it is meant be fairer...but in practice it's cumbersome and bureaucratic. Users now have to supply their address details for simply downloading software (in order for the merchant to confirm their location). There is no benefit to the user other than having to give more of their personal info away to merchants. Plus, now merchants have to retain all that personal data for many years for accounting and auditing purposes.

Harmonising VAT on physical goods will probably never happen, but the EU could have proposed a single VAT rate for digital goods and services which might actually have gained traction. Did they ever pursue this? If not, why not?

The people from the European Commission who are helping shape the "Digital Single Market" don't always inspire confidence even if they have the best of intentions: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/2014-2019/ansip/blog/euvat_e...

> Harmonising VAT on physical goods will probably never happen

I wouldn't say that too quickly. People tend to paint the EU as some bureaucratic behemoth, but the whole point of the project was to vastly reduce administrative overhead for deploying to EU markets, and it has done so quite successfully. Compare "meet EU standards and it can be sold everywhere in the EU" to "have to double check the standards for every country we want to deploy to" - it's pretty obvious why the former is easier to deal with.

In fact, one of the biggest problems it is currently facing is that it's running out of things to fix in that sense. When it was about standardizing, I don't know, legally allowed substances in perfume, the benefits of standardisation far outweighed the hassle of changing local regulation. Now that its doing all kinds of things that can't be summarized as "everyone will (begrudgingly) go along because even in the worst case it benefits every involved nation", it's much harder to reach a consensus this way (paraphrasing a few books on the EU from memory).

Anyway, standardised VAT rules could fall under the old "benefits everyone"-category of projects, even for non-digital goods, so who knows?

last time i ordered from swiss to germany, tax used to be paid on import and there is the possibility to file for tax return on export. So, this change only moves the responsibility of paying the tax back to the seller. Offering a billing adress for online shopping is standard in almost every case. They are just closing a schutzluecke (a gap, a lack of protection)

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