Here's what it took for the small American company I work at to get registered to sell downloadable digital goods from our American web site to EU customers: •

Here's what it took for the small American company I work at to get registered to sell downloadable digital goods from our American web site to EU customers: • About 15 minutes or so on the website of the Irish tax authorities. Once we started selling, here's the ongoing burden: • Collect VAT at the VAT rate of the country the customer is in. • Early on in each quarter run a script that produces a report that shows our total sales for each EU country and how much VAT we collected for that country. • Upload that report to the Irish tax authorities and give them the total VAT we collected. The Irish tax authorities deal with reporting our sales to the other countries and distributing the collected VAT to them. • Keep our VAT rate table up to date. Unlike sales tax in the US VAT rates rarely change. Looking at our database of VAT rates I see an average of 1.7 rate changes per year over the last several years. That's 1.7 changes per year for the whole EU, not per country. When VAT changes it almost always changes on a quarter boundary (I think I've only seen one or two times when it changed during a quarter). Since the rates are per country there aren't many of them. It would not be too much hassle to simply download the rates from some EU government site and manually update our rate DB. What we actually do is use an API from apilayer.com. Their free tier allows 1000 requests per year which is way more than are needed to keep up with VAT changes since it is one API call to get the rates for all of the EU. We used Ireland because English is one of their official languages. We could have picked any other EU country to deal with instead of Ireland, although the registering and reporting details would differ so registering and reporting might not be as easy. Compare to what an American company that wants to sell to multiple American states has to do to deal with sales tax. The tax depends on the exact address of the buyer, not just the state, and you have to register and file with each state. Generally dealing with that means you have to use a paid service which will charge a percentage of your sales. If you only need to collect tax in the states that have joined the Streamlines Sales Tax group you can get a sort of EU like experience. To that you have to agree to collect tax for all of the SST states even if you only are actually legally required to collect for some of them, and then you can use a paid tax service from their list and the SST states will pay the cost of that. If you need to collect tax for any of the approximately half the states not part of SST then you'll have to deal with those states separately.