
Gumroad: EU citizens pay max VAT on ebooks or can go to hell - gbon
Trying to purchase the book &quot;Hands-on Scala&quot;, advertised here on HN.<p>TLDR: We can&#x27;t support multiple VAT percentages on our system: you could pay the maximum VAT rate applied in your country or you can go to hell.<p>&quot;Gumroad Support via helpscout.net<p>9:15 PM (1 hour ago)<p>to me<p>Translate message
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&quot;Your system doesn&#x27;t support different VATs for kind of product, perhaps ?&quot;<p>That&#x27;s correct, as told you in our previous emails:<p>We flatly label all of our products as &quot;digital products&quot; so none of our products are labelled as &quot;ebooks&quot; but rather a &quot;digital product&quot;<p>So, we use the VAT rates that we are told to charge for digital products.<p>Best,
Steve, Manager of Support Gumroad&quot;<p>That is what happened trying to buy that e-book, Paypal notified me that I had to pay a high VAT tax. Because in my country (and other EU states) there are lower VAT taxes on cultural goods (i.e. books), I asked explanations to the customer care. So because their system can not handle multiple VAT rates for a specific country, as confirmed after my questions, they chose to apply the always the highest tax for all the goods they sell, including the books, independently of the rate officially assigned to their category.<p>So I can pay five times the standard  VAT for an e-book or I can go to hell.<p>Outstanding!
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mytailorisrich
The thing is that one cannot 'choose' to apply a higher or lower VAT rate.

I would think that knowingly charging for VAT that isn't due may be considered
fraud because they tell their customers to pay extra for tax when they know
the money isn't tax and will go into their pocket.

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detaro
It doesn't necessarily follow that they pocket the money - if they truly do
not make a distinction between products and treat everything the same, one
would expect them to pay the full amount to the tax authorities - who
generally have less of a problem with being given too much money. This
classification can be tricky - an e-book that qualifies for lower rate in
country A might not qualify for the lower rate in country B, despite B having
a lowered rate for other e-books, so it might make some business sense to just
always use the higher rate, not spend money on evaluating this case-by-case
and avoid getting in trouble for paying to little tax.

That said, under national laws you might very well have a right to _correct_
billing, and could demand a corrected invoice. Good luck enforcing that
effectively against a US company though for small sums.

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mytailorisrich
Sure, never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by
incompetence, even when the incompetence is off the scale.

Enforcing any right to correct in this case is hard but collecting all the
evidence and tipping off the tax authorities about VAT irregularities can be a
sweet revenge as well.

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gbon
I want only purchase the ebook paying the right price, without be bullied by
anyone (Gumroad or other monopolists).

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gbon
Amazon knows how to apply the VAT in EU:

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201895820)

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maxharris
It's just not worth doing business in the EU because regulation and taxes are
too high there.

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nvbg
It's true, but nobody force them: if they chose to do business there they
can't vex the customers.

