Gumroad: EU citizens pay max VAT on ebooks or can go to hell
Trying to purchase the book &quot;Hands-on Scala&quot;, advertised here on HN.<p>TLDR: We can&#x27;t support multiple VAT percentages on our system: you could pay the maximum VAT rate applied in your country or you can go to hell.<p>&quot;Gumroad Support via helpscout.net<p>9:15 PM (1 hour ago)<p>to me<p>Translate message
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&quot;Your system doesn&#x27;t support different VATs for kind of product, perhaps ?&quot;<p>That&#x27;s correct, as told you in our previous emails:<p>We flatly label all of our products as &quot;digital products&quot; so none of our products are labelled as &quot;ebooks&quot; but rather a &quot;digital product&quot;<p>So, we use the VAT rates that we are told to charge for digital products.<p>Best,
Steve, Manager of Support Gumroad&quot;<p>That is what happened trying to buy that e-book, Paypal notified me that I had to pay a high VAT tax. Because in my country (and other EU states) there are lower VAT taxes on cultural goods (i.e. books), I asked explanations to the customer care. So because their system can not handle multiple VAT rates for a specific country, as confirmed after my questions, they chose to apply the always the highest tax for all the goods they sell, including the books, independently of the rate officially assigned to their category.<p>So I can pay five times the standard  VAT for an e-book or I can go to hell.<p>Outstanding!