HACKER Q&A
📣 quizitive

2 sided global platforms – how are you handling sales tax?


Assume you are a platform connecting buyers and sellers of service globally. Lets say this is a marketplace for graphic design service.

Handling sales tax appears to be very hard:

* EU wants you to charge the buyer at the point where the buyer is located and rates differ by country. Are there any companies offering APIs for this?

* Each state in the US has its own rules. There are companies like TaxJar offering APIs to east this pain. Can any users comment on their experiences with similar services?

* Repeat for literally every country in the world.

* But charging the right amount of tax appears to be the easier part of the problem. Now assume you have charged sales tax/VAT to buyers in various countries at the correct rate. At the end of the year you now supposed to make payments to the tax authorities in each of these countries? And each state in the US?

How are you solving this?

Thanks.


  👤 mtmail Accepted Answer ✓
We (based in Europe) use https://quaderno.io/ for the tax calculation, reporting, invoice creating and sending. For example they collect the proofs the EU needs, like country of user, country of bank, country of transaction (IP address). They're not a payment provider but connect to others, we use Stripe. I recommend them. Not sure about US states, that doesn't apply to us.