From January 1, 2015, the European Union has put into effect the new rules about the taxation on the purchase of digital goods (software, electronic, e-book, telecommunications and broadcast services) for European citizens.

In the business to consumer sale, the shop must apply the VAT of the country of the purchaser; while in the business to business it all depends whether the company owns valid VAT number recognized by the European Union.

Handling EU VAT requirements can be very tricky, especially if you want to create a custom solution to handle things. Luckily, all users of WooCommerce can rely on a couple of great plugins that handle all the heavy lifting for you.

These are my favorite ones:

YITH WooCommerce EU VAT

Whether you have a European shop or not, you need a way to understand the origin of your customers.

In addition, YITH WooCommerce EU VAT makes a double check on the origin of your customers, just like requested by the new law: this process to apply the correct VAT implies a geolocalization check of the customers, which will have to confirm of manually change their nation.

This is why YITH WooCommerce EU VAT is your secret weapon: it allows you to apply automatically the correct taxes depending on your customers’ nation, without any other operation.

Moreover, the plugin will make a recap of the amount you have to pay monthly, freeing you from calculations and researches!

The plugin is available in DUTCH, ENGLISH, ITALIAN, SPANISH languages, with more coming soon. I know the guys behind YITH personally and I can vouch for them. They built many of their plugins for their own use first and foremost, so you can rely on plugins that are tried and tested on a store that handles thousands of transactions per year.

Get YITH WooCommerce EU VAT for WooCommerce

WooCommerce EU VAT Number

This is the official WooCommerce extension for EU VAT.
It provides your checkout with a field to collect and validate a customer’s EU VAT number, if they have one. Upon entering a valid VAT number, the business will not be charged VAT at your store.

The validation function uses the handy VIES.

It works well enough but it is not as maintained as the one from YITH nor does it have as much functionality. If you’re already using it without any issues you can continue using it, however if you are setting up your store now you should definitely use the YITH EU VAT plugin.

WooCommerce EU VAT Number