E-BOOK
Digital Products and VAT
Sell a printable through Etsy and the platform handles the VAT. Sell exactly the same file from your own website and you are responsible for it, in every country your buyers live in, from the first sale and with no threshold. This book is about that gap and how to stay on the right side of it.
- Why the deemed supplier rule protects most sellers, and the exact day it stops
- What actually counts as a digital service, and the boundary a human step moves you across
- Whether platform-collected VAT sits inside or outside your own threshold, and why nobody can tell you
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Who this book is for?
Anyone selling files: printables, patterns, presets, templates, fonts, e-books, courses and audio. On a marketplace, from your own site, or both. Particularly if you are thinking about moving off the marketplace to save the fees, because that is the decision this book exists for.
If you sell only through a marketplace
You are almost certainly fine, and it is worth knowing why rather than assuming. Chapter three explains what the deemed supplier rule does, what it does not do, and the four things to check on a real order before relying on it.
If you sell from your own site as well
Chapter four is the one to read first. There is no marketplace between you and the buyer, so the supply is yours, and for a consumer in another country that means VAT in their country from the first sale. There are three ways to handle it and one of them is simply to sell only to the UK.
If you are about to move off the marketplace
The fee saving is real and so is what comes with it. Chapter nine works out roughly where the two cross: at two hundred sales a year the saving will not cover the admin, at five thousand it comfortably will, and the answer flips somewhere in between.
FACTS
No threshold
Cross-border digital sales to consumers have no registration threshold at all. Not ten thousand euros, not any number. One two-pound printable sold to one buyer in France creates a liability in principle, from that sale.
300 units a month
the break-even
11 chapters
One sitting
FACTS
37 per cent
What Etsy takes from a two pound download, against sixteen per cent from a twenty pound one. Same file, same fees. Forty pence of the charges are flat, and at the bottom of the price range they are most of what you pay.