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Creating a smooth path to checkout and removing obstacles is really important in terms of conversion rates. Having to ask for information that people are going

Creating a smooth path to checkout and removing obstacles is really important in terms of conversion rates. Having to ask for information that people are going to see as very intrusive during that checkout flow is highly likely to cause cart abandonment. We get people already complaining that we make them create an account to buy software - and we use the accounts for other things such as support and license management. How much more will people feel they are being asked for too much information if all they want to buy is an ebook?

johansch 12y ago
Stripe/Paypal already have the billing address of the (credit-card based) customer. They would need to adapt their APIs/checkout flows to enable a nice UX. If they don't they expose themselves to increased competition from other solutions that do manage to solve this.
pja 12y ago
Yeah, this is really going to entrench the big players (Amazon, Google, Apple et al) who already have your contact details for a myriad other reasons.
- johansch 12y ago
  Any payment solution that is based on credit cards would have the same contact details. How does size matter here?
  - pja 12y ago
    The problem as reported is that many current payment methods used online either do not have such information, or the payment system being used (eg credit card via paypal) hides that data from the vendor, making it very hard to both provide a seamless checkout and capture the information required to levy the correct taxes. That said, I'm really not sure that all this "two pieces of data must be collected" is as onerous as everybody is saying - the guidance seems much looser than that. For each transaction they want 2 consistent pieces of evidence of location, but the sources of said data are fairly broad & include ip address, some form of geolocation and the self reported location by the end-user, credit card location etc etc. Anything that the vendor believes to be reasonably reliable according to their data-model really. See guidance document here: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/explanatory_notes_2015_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/tax... which amongst other things states that a country located account number (bank / credit card) combined with a customer self-reported country location is enough in many cases. (This is what Steam requests already btw.) The problem for vendors is that the rules pushes liability onto them when they want certainty, plus the data storage requirements are fairly stringent (10 years!). The tax authorities are effectively saying: you can either collect enough information to be absolutely certain of the end-user location or collect less and carry the risk that an audit will result in big fines if we decide that you've been attempting to evade VAT by misrepresenting the location of your customers. This is of course no different from any other tax, but with a new system there's always some uncertainty to begin with until things settle down & no one likes uncertainty.

johansch 12y ago

Stripe/Paypal already have the billing address of the (credit-card based) customer. They would need to adapt their APIs/checkout flows to enable a nice UX. If they don't they expose themselves to increased competition from other solutions that do manage to solve this.

pja 12y ago

Yeah, this is really going to entrench the big players (Amazon, Google, Apple et al) who already have your contact details for a myriad other reasons.

johansch 12y ago
Any payment solution that is based on credit cards would have the same contact details. How does size matter here?
- pja 12y ago
  The problem as reported is that many current payment methods used online either do not have such information, or the payment system being used (eg credit card via paypal) hides that data from the vendor, making it very hard to both provide a seamless checkout and capture the information required to levy the correct taxes. That said, I'm really not sure that all this "two pieces of data must be collected" is as onerous as everybody is saying - the guidance seems much looser than that. For each transaction they want 2 consistent pieces of evidence of location, but the sources of said data are fairly broad & include ip address, some form of geolocation and the self reported location by the end-user, credit card location etc etc. Anything that the vendor believes to be reasonably reliable according to their data-model really. See guidance document here: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/explanatory_notes_2015_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/resources/documents/tax... which amongst other things states that a country located account number (bank / credit card) combined with a customer self-reported country location is enough in many cases. (This is what Steam requests already btw.) The problem for vendors is that the rules pushes liability onto them when they want certainty, plus the data storage requirements are fairly stringent (10 years!). The tax authorities are effectively saying: you can either collect enough information to be absolutely certain of the end-user location or collect less and carry the risk that an audit will result in big fines if we decide that you've been attempting to evade VAT by misrepresenting the location of your customers. This is of course no different from any other tax, but with a new system there's always some uncertainty to begin with until things settle down & no one likes uncertainty.