Global payment processor for VAT?
March 4, 2021 5:58 AM   Subscribe

I plan to launch a subscription service as a freelancer. A sticking point is that I and my business are located in Sweden, which means that I am obligated to collect VAT (value-added taxes) on subscription services purchased by Swedish residents (and possibly other EU residents as well but that part I can figure out on my own). I am having problems finding an appropriate and affordable payment processor.

Needed: a payment processor that can add VAT to the purchase price of a subscription service if a Swedish resident buys a subscription but not add VAT for other subscribers. Does anyone know of a payment processor that can handle VAT collection for a small business and accept (ideally) multiple currencies? Finding support for this is more challenging than I expected.
posted by Bella Donna to Work & Money (4 answers total)
 
Best answer: Is the service you are offering a digital service or a human service such as consultation, support, or design? If your subscription service is a digital service (particularly one of the services eligible for VAT MOSS), take a look at Paddle.com. They support recurring payments, VAT (including both inclusive or exclusive pricing), multiple currencies and localized checkout (including Swedish).
posted by RichardP at 6:21 AM on March 4, 2021 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I haven't done this specific thing, but I bet Shopify can handle it. The company I currently work for ships to 45+ countries, and we use Shopify to handle payments in £/$/€ and charge different taxes in different regions, including right down to handling individual city taxes in the USA.
posted by spielzebub at 7:16 AM on March 4, 2021 [2 favorites]


Best answer: I’m not sure what level of thing you need - i.e. how much work, if any, you’re able and willing to do to set things up technically. I’ve used Chargebee for a subscription service, but it involved some coding at our end to integrate it with our site. As I understand it, it handles the VAT stuff OK.

It’s built on top of Stripe (which is a bit more low level again and, I think, bafflingly, doesn’t handle VAT automatically), so it might also be worth looking at their list of “partners” for recurring billing, to see if there’s anything there that fits the bill.
posted by fabius at 5:24 AM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Also, I subscribe to a couple of things that use Memberful and that looks like it does some handling of VAT although I’m not 100% certain if it does exactly what you need. Again, built on top of Stripe.
posted by fabius at 5:28 AM on March 5, 2021


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