Do most startups simply ignore international taxes?

> What am I missing? Are people just not registering for VAT?

That's the impression I got when I researched it. I found lots of post of people explaining their tech stack and payment workflows, but almost none about how they handled country specific tax and VAT.

Paddle, Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy and Fastspring all handle this for you. I went with Paddle for payments for a Chrome extension and I haven't had to think about country specific tax since.

I occasionally check Paddle's changelog (https://new.paddle.com/) to see what new countries and tax changes they're having to deal with weekly to remind myself why I went with them.

There's meant to be SaaS products that work with Stripe to help with tax but is it worth the hassle compared to refunding the existing customers and moving to one of payment the providers above? Ignoring the problem until you grow bigger and then having to correct tax errors in retrospect is an incredibly bad idea imo (fines, paying accountants to sort out missing tax filings, untangling the mess, having to contact old customers about it), that's going to get in the way of you growing your product and cause a lot of stress.

Small businesses do not routinely send pennies to the UAE. Countries do not have unlimited resources to chase after you. The law cannot be universally enforced, so the government has to pick and choose its battles. And they aren't going to bother with you. You need to be concerned about the tax law in the country you reside and have citizenship.

Don't block international sales but do ignore international taxes of you are that small. And use the likes of Stripe only to handle payments, not tax.

As a rule do not take advice on tax evasion from random strangers. This should be a quick consult with a professional.

I'm a bootstrapper. I use a merchant of record service to handle this because I need to spend my time building and growing, not doing paperwork.

Yes, it sucks that it costs more. Yes, it sucks that I have more platform/vendor risk. Yes, it sucks that I can't use the platform I know best (Stripe).

But yes, it's worth it to know that if our efforts succeed and we grow a lot then we won't have to drop everything to get compliant with the 87 countries and countless local jurisdictions we've made sales in.

You use another company as a Merchant of Record (like Stripe) and they handle all of that for you for a larger fee. Are you setup correctly or is UAE some kind of exception?

AFAIK, UAE has a minimum threshold of ~$100k of turnover to get eligible for VAT so I'm not sure why were you penalized.

Besides, is your stripe + company registered in UAE?

At your scale you may just want to give it to them for free or not take the customer. It's unlikely they will come after you for this amount I'd say, but if you grow bigger I can imagine this coming back to haunt you. I also don't know if you'd be subject to UAE commercial law if you take a customer from there, there are some jurisdictional norms in place you may have to explicitly disclaim in your terms of service. You can get sued internationally and that gets really expensive.

Talk to a lawyer, talk to a tax attorney. Don't take legal advice from the Internet since your situation is likely not going to match the person's who answers.

Maybe a little off topic: I see a lot of the benefits in using a Merchant of Record (MoR) and yet I really like using Paid Memberships Pro (PMP) for Wordpress.

Does anyone know of an MoR that might connect to Wordpress in a similar way to PMP? Or even how to hook up an MoR to function through PMP?

Maybe just in general, an MoR that does membership sites well?

Lastly, an MoR that does nonprofit sites?

I've looked into MoR's before but the fees are very high. For SaaS specific global sales tax compliance, I'd look at Anrok. They support sales tax globally (U.S., VAT, GST, etc.)