Not deducting VAT for non-EU orders

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Are there any workarounds that would allow me to charge customer outside the EU the same price as UK and EU orders.

For example:
A widget is listed on the website at £10, when an EU/UK customer goes through checkout he is told the price is £10 with a line stated that the price includes £1.67 VAT, if a customer from the USA views the item he sees that the price is £10 is happy to pay £10 but then goes through checkout to find that VAT has been deducted and only has to pay £8.33.

I would like the prices to be:
UK/EU: £8.33 + £1.67 VAT = £10.00
Non-EU - £10.00 + no VAT = £10.00

I assume I could apply a 20% surcharge to non-EU orders but imagine that in the basket//checkout and on the invoice the VAT deduction will be displayed along with a separate line for the surcharge. Ideally I would like non-EU orders to be processed as they were before I was VAT registered, with no mention of VAT and at the same full price.

If this can't be done easily is it something that could be achieved with some paid for modifications.

[saucysal]

I have the same problem

I have had the same problem (since 2003), and have not found a good solution. What I do is charge the same total for all customers, have a note in the cart and checkout about the VAT for outside the EU and Channel islands, repeated in the T & C, that the VAT element is removed in our offline book-keeping but the totals remain the same for everyone. The invoice/receipt with the goods shows no VAT, non-EU and Channel Islands. I get occasional complaints, but generally the customers accept it or get used to it, and we have many regular customers in the Channel Islands who have continued to order regularly for years with this system.

It has always annoyed me that some people in the Channel Islands think that they should pay less than anyone else. For some unknown reason, we never get complaints from non-EU countries, only from the Channel islands.

Sarah

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Thanks Sarah I thought that may be the case.

If I was to look at a paid for mod to be able to achieve this is it a major job or could it be achieved with a few simple changes to the script files..

[Donna Kempster]

Hi Darren - did you ever get a resolution to this?

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

No, unfortunately not but would still interested in a solution.

[leehack]

Could you not put it in the delivery cost for that region? ie lets say EU delivery is £5.00, so you could have delivery cost with a trigger of £0.01 costing £5 and then have excess delivery charges of 1p per 5p? Effectively adding the 20% back on.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Although that would adjust the overall total to be the amount I would like, I think the invoice and on screen breakdown of the prices would be confusing as the invoice/checkout pages would still show the Exempted VAT line and the shipping charge would be higher than they expect.

To use this method I wouldn't be able to display the delivery charge in advance and the customer would get a delivery charge that is based on the order value.
I currently use weight based shipping for overseas so a customer placing a £100 order that might normally be charged at £5.75 would now get charged £25.75, so not ideal, but thanks for the suggestion.

An ideal solution just needs to get rid of the exempted VAT element and treat the order as if I was not VAT registered.

[leehack]

Furry muff, that make sense. Unless you go back to no vat on site I can't see how you could do it.

Can i ask just out of interest, why do you want to do this, i'm struggling to understand, to UK customers it will make no difference, to EU customers they expect to not pay vat and to you, the profit is the same. Sorry if that's being nosey, just want to understand.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

To clarify it is to customers outside the EU that I would like to zero rate/exempt the VAT while keeping the total price the same.

The main reason would be to provide a little extra profit on the non-EU sales which are a little more time consuming due to the requirement for customs forms and I perceive they carry an increased risk of getting lost in post (which is also a much higher financial loss than parcels sent to the UK due to the high Royal Mail Airmail postage costs), both of which I could add on to our overseas delivery charges but even at cost price or below customers often feel the delivery charges are high.

I guess it partly comes down to whether a customer outside of the EU 'expects' the VAT to be deducted or not. My feeling is that most don't although could be wrong. I have been trading for many years before VAT registration and was never once had a customer mention that VAT hadn't been deducted suspect a large majority of customers making a purchase never look through the T&C's to find out whether a company is VAT registered.
I have also traded on ebay where all customers are treated the same whether they are from inside or outside the EU and is extremely difficult to deduct the VAT from the price without time consuming manually refunds, I just treat them the same but have a different invoice where VAT is not mentioned thereby providing a little extra profit on the sale.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

An alternative would be to display the excluding VAT price for non-EU customers and the VAT inclusive price for UK and EU customers so that at least a customer from the USA see the lower VAT exclusive price rather then the higher VAT inclusive price.
This wouldn't give the extra profit but at least the customer is making their decision to purchase based on the real price they will pay and not get to checkout to find the price is lower than they thought (unless they are expecting a VAT deduction).
I guess that this is not achievable without displaying both inclusive and exclusive prices on the page which I am not keen on.

[I-CC]

A few hurdles need to be overcome.

1. Add all of the countries into the VAT group, so they all get the usual 20% UK tax applied.
2. Remove/hide the Tax row information from the shopping cart layouts, so it is not mentioned at all, and possibly replace with a message that all prices in checkout includes relevant taxes where applicable.

Those 2 should be easy enough to achieve, thus it stops any mention or display of VAT amount being applied to the order and prevents VAT Exemption being employed saving them the extra as they are all bundled into being charged the VAT.

The element which would need some working would be the emails as its not broken down into separate variables like, total, tax, etc etc and is served all up from a single variable in the email template, but I guess those who have delved into this area of the perl scripts more than me might know which line to amend/comment out that might prevent it from appearing in the email possibly.

Just some ideas.