OSS for people who sell digital services into the EU

Digital services sold to EU consumers are taxed where the customer is. That used to mean a VAT registration in every country you sold to. The One Stop Shop is the workaround: one registration, one quarterly return, many rates.

Which scheme

If you are established in the EU, you use the Union scheme in your own country. If you are in the UK or the US and you sell digital services to EU consumers, you use the Non-Union scheme and you pick one member state to host it. There is no small-seller threshold for businesses established outside the EU. The first euro to a French consumer can be French VAT.

What OSS does not do

It does not decide the rate for you. You still charge the rate of the customer’s country, usually the standard rate for digital services. Reduced rates are rare in that category. It does not cover a sale to a business. That sale is reverse charged, and it does not go on the OSS return. It does not remove the need for two pieces of evidence about where the customer is: billing country, IP address, bank country, that sort of pair.

A shop on top

If a marketplace is the seller for VAT purposes, the marketplace may collect the tax. Charging it again is how you upset a customer and create a return you cannot explain. Read the platform’s tax setting before you add a VAT line in RateNest.

The country pages are the rate list. The OSS return is still filed with a tax administration, not with this site.