New EU regulations on Geo-blocking

[14Steve14]

Been loitering here for a while and finally have a question which I hope someone can help with.

I have just been reading about these Geo blocking regulations and am now confused. These regulations come into effect on the 3rd December 2018. My small business has a website selling downloadable PDF files, amongst other things, which are sent to the buyer automatically. They cost £1-99 and are therefore really cheap, and not many are sold monthly. I have purposely stopped them being available to EU countries because of the administration required for the VAT MOSS system. Those countries are blocked from seeing any payment methods meaning they cannot buy them without being naughty and changing their country to something else.

Now, with these new geo-blocking regulations, will I

1. have to open up the downloadable products to all EU members and have to comply with the VAT MOSS regulations
or
2. Stop selling the downloads totally, as complying with one regulation means having to comply with the other
or
3. I have this all wrong and have no need to worry.

A bit of advice is required.

 

[arnydnxluk]

AFAIK you will need to open up the downloadable products to all EU members and comply with the VAT MOSS regulations.

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/geo-blocking

• When a customer wants to buy an electronically supplied service, such as cloud services, data warehousing or website hosting, from a trader established in another Member State. Such customers are entitled to do so in the same way as local customers are.
• Example: A Bulgarian consumer wishes to buy hosting services for her website from a Spanish company. She will have access to the service, can register and buy this service without having to pay additional fees compared to a Spanish consumer.

I can think of two services to help you deal with VAT MOSS for digital downloads:

• SendOwl has features to assist in collecting the relevant data and charging the right amount of VAT.
• Payhip actually collects and pays EU VAT for you. In this case Payhip becomes your B2B customer rather than you dealing with many B2C customers.

 

[KM-Tiger]

AFAIK you will need to open up the downloadable products to all EU members and comply with the VAT MOSS regulations.

Are you sure?

It would seem that there is an exemption for 'e-books', which I think the OP's products could be considered to be.

 

[arnydnxluk]

Are you sure?

It would seem that there is an exemption for 'e-books', which I think the OP's products could be considered to be.

Nope - just as far as I know, although my research has mostly been focused on virtual game currencies. It does look there's an extra bit of information referencing e-books in the FAQs to support your point, I must have missed this and stand corrected if that's the case.

 

[ecommerce84]

I don’t want to turn this into a Brexit thread, but this is exactly the sort of thing people mean when they say we are being ‘dictated to by Brussels’.

Is there really a need to force a business to sell to countries they don’t want to? If the OP decides to simply stop selling their downloads, then no one can buy one. Now everyone across the EU is equal at least but 65 million people are now unable to get something they couldn’t previously. Very odd.

People will probably tell you this is bad advice but I would just ignore the new regulation.

Who is likely to report you? Who is actually going to police it? Will the law even apply or be enforceable *if* Brexit goes ahead next March.

 

[quikshop]

To be honest unless you're a high turnover business the likelihood of anyone caring whether or not you decide to allow people in Romania to buy a digital product is not worth worrying about.

There are countries within the EU I do not and will not sell to, and that decision is based on a risk assessment of historic fraudulent attempts and crime-riddled postal services. If I could figure out how to exclude parts of the UK inc. east London I would

 

[Alan]

As mentioned, unlikely that a bit of EU law breaking by a few £1.99 downloads a month is going to be a big issue, but if it makes you feel uncomfortable stop selling 3rd Dec 2018 to 29 March 2019.

 

[14Steve14]

Many thanks for the comments. To be honest I may keep things as they are. I have found a 4th option which is to manually send the download files to customers thus totally negating the need to register for VAT, but that is not what the customers that download products want. They want them straight away.

Ignore and pretend I didnt know anything may be the best option.