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Hi
I'm based in the UK, although my website is hosted in Europe.
I have set up my cart with this setting:
Sell Digital Downloads to countries in Euro zone = No
I want it to allow sales to the UK but not the rest of Europe. On my test page (https://andybellphotography.com/galleri … nar-skies/) I have both a set of photos and a standalone button that add Digital downloads to the Cart.
In testing it seems to work (my site is live so I don't really want to switch PayPal into test mode) but if, using a VPN, I pretend to be in another EU country, the cart still functions...
Questions:
How does the Cart 'know' where I am based? How (or when) does it determine to allow/disallow a digital sale due to the purchaser being in the EU but not in the UK...
Many thanks
Andy
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Hi Andy, the sale is restricted based on the country of the buyer as specified during checkout.
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Ok
So do I need to do anything to tell backlight that I’m in the UK? I couldn’t see anything specific in the settings and it has to know where I am to allow UK residents to buy and non-UK EU residents not to...
Andy
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Hi Andy, when digital downloads are set to be taxed and other-EU country is set to no, customers will see a country dropdown on the main Cart page. Changing that to any EU country that is not the UK won't let you checkout. If set to the UK and the customer checks out through PayPal, then the country information of the user account is sent back to the cart, and if from another EU country, the user will not be able to finalise the checkout.
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Ben, what I’m asking is how Backlight knows which country ME - the seller - is in. I could be in France or Germany.
Where do I tell Backlight this? If I move to France and therefore can only accept EU customers from France how do I let Backlight know??
Andy
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OK - I can answer my own question, although I had to look at the code in ShoppingCart.php, function tryingToSellVirtualItemsToBlockedCountry()
To make this work I have to
1) Charge Sales Tax (even though I'm not VAT regiostered (yet))
2) Set my Sales Tax Country to the UK
3) Set Sell Digital Downloads to countries in Euro zone to NO
This isn't very intuitive, because if I was charging Sales Tax (VAT) in the UK there is absolutely no reason why I wouldn't sell Digital products to the Eurozone.
To make this work for me I have had to enter the Sales Tax amount as Zero as I don't actually charge Sales Tax...
I'm curious also about how this would work for a non European seller? There's only one field for Sales Tax percentage so how do they handle charging Eurozone Sales Tax if the tax amount differs from the local one?
I know that the sales tax rules are complicated and you may well be reluctant to keep the Cart in step with current regulations but that's the rub when selling software - I did it for years as a one man band and it's not easy.
Anyhow, I think I'm set up OK and I've included a message in my Cart to say that I wont sell digital downloads to the Eurozone apart from the UK, so hopefully customers wont go through most of the checkout process only to be told they cant complete the purchase...
Andy
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OK - I can answer my own question, although I had to look at the code in ShoppingCart.php, function tryingToSellVirtualItemsToBlockedCountry()
All you had to do was wait a reasonable amount of time for a response rather than trying to reverse engineer the code.
The restriction on digital purchases to other EU countries is precisely due to the tax complexities. Handling all of the tax variations is beyond the scope of the Cart product, so we added that option so that photographers wouldn't be able to sell digital copies locally without having to be concerned with sales to other European countries that may not be their intended audience. If you do plan to sell to other EU countries then the onus is on you and your business to manage your tax obligations. We are simply too small a team to deal with complexities like this.
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andy.photos.bell wrote:OK - I can answer my own question, although I had to look at the code in ShoppingCart.php, function tryingToSellVirtualItemsToBlockedCountry()
All you had to do was wait a reasonable amount of time for a response rather than trying to reverse engineer the code.
Actually, I couldn’t wait as I wanted to go live this morning and your answer didn’t answer my question...
I appreciate you are a small business and covering every option may be impractical.
However, if I lived outside the EU and charged sales tax locally I wouldn’t be able to sell digital products to the EU unless my local tax rate was the same as the EU’s. That’s a definite product limitation and there’s nothing I could do about it... It would be good if the product docs were explicit about this.
Anyway, as I’m currently in the EU I can work with this as it stands and, hopefully, anyone searching these forums for the answer to this question won’t need to bother you about it. If BREXIT happens then I’d be potentially in the scenario I’ve just described, as would all your UK customers.
Andy
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I hope you got *some* insight into my earlier answer even if it wasn't what you needed.
Since you are in the EU then it's a moot point, isn't it? We can adjust the logic if Brexit ever happens.
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