VAT that follows the product and the customer

Most ecommerce platforms treat VAT as a single number in a settings screen, which works right up until your catalogue contains more than one kind of thing. In the UK it usually contains several: standard-rated goods, zero-rated children’s clothing, zero-rated books and most food, and reduced-rate items.

Charge the wrong one and it is not a rounding error you absorb. It is a return that has to be corrected, on transactions that have already completed.

The rate belongs to the product

Tax rules are held per product rather than per site, so a catalogue containing a £30 adult jacket and a £30 children’s jacket charges 20% on one and nothing on the other, automatically, on every channel and at the till.

This is one of the clearest arguments for the catalogue being in one place. Two systems means two sets of tax rules, and the second one is always the one nobody remembered to update.

Where the customer is, and what they are

Destination changes the answer, and so does whether the buyer is a business. A consumer in Ireland, a VAT-registered business in Ireland, and a consumer in Manchester are three different calculations on the same order.

For trade accounts this matters more than it does for retail, because the amounts are larger and the customer’s own accountant will check. A validated registration number on a trade account is part of the tax decision, not just a field on a form.

Invoices that survive an accountant

An invoice that shows only a total is an invoice your customer will email you about. Documents show the net, the rate applied, the VAT amount and your registration number, per line — which is both what the rules require and what stops the question being asked.

Marketplaces complicate this and you should know how

Some marketplaces collect and remit VAT themselves on certain transactions, which means the tax treatment of an order can be decided by the channel rather than by you. Those orders should not be double-counted in your own return.

Being honest about the shape of this: Qwikr records the tax position that arrived with the order rather than recalculating it, so what reaches your accounts is what the channel actually did. Reconciling that correctly is still a conversation to have with your accountant — no software should tell you it has handled marketplace VAT liability on your behalf.

What this is not

This is not tax advice and Qwikr is not your accountant. It applies the rules you configure, consistently, everywhere, and shows its working. Deciding which rule a product falls under is a question for someone qualified to answer it — the value here is that once you have that answer, it is applied the same way on every channel without anybody remembering to.