VAT used to be much easier in Europe because you were charged VAT in your home country, not the country of the customer. That's far easier to establish and mean

VAT used to be much easier in Europe because you were charged VAT in your home country, not the country of the customer. That's far easier to establish and means you're dealing with your local government in your native language. The EU Commission forcibly changed this some years ago to the present system which is drastically more complicated, where you have to figure out where your customer is. There are even special rules for things like people who buy things whilst on cruise ships. Then you have to submit VAT returns to every single country where you have customers, and those countries are under no obligation to make it easy, for instance, they usually only offer tax returns in their own language. Because this is impossible to comply with without enormous numbers of staff, there's now a whole industry of tax middlemen who do it for you. Thus selling to the EU is a nightmare of overheads and costs. It doesn't have to be this way because it never used to be that way, but the EU is ideologically committed to the socialist notion that tax competition is harmful and should be eliminated.