Product-specific VAT Rates in the EU and Restrictions
Bespoke can fully support the handling of product “country exceptions” that are applicable to a specific country.
When shipping inside the EU and distance selling is applicable, by default Bespoke will enforce the
respective shipping country’s standard (maximum) VAT rate when calculating product prices. However, in most EU countries, there are certain categories of products that allow a non-standard (reduced) VAT rate defined in this country to be applied.
Another sample of a product “country exceptions” is product restrictions in a certain country. These can be either defined by the merchant for commercial reasons (e.g. brand or category restrictions) or by Global‑e for regulatory reasons (e.g. products containing some furs when shipping to Australia). By default, product restrictions will be enforced when the user gets to Global‑e checkout.
In order to support product “exceptions”, such as reduced product VAT rates in the EU and restrictions applied when browsing the merchant’s site (before the user gets to Global‑e checkout), Bespoke needs to be able to read this information embedded within the DOM.
The respective “exceptions” data can be indicated in the data-countries data attribute for these products.
Below are 2 examples of how the “country exceptions” data attribute should appear on the website:
<div data-countries="{"IT" : {"restricted" :" true, "vat" : 10.0}, "US" {"restricted" : true}, "DE" : {"vat" : 7.0}}"></div>In the sample above, the product will be restricted in Italy and in the US and will have reduced VAT in Italy and Germany.
<div data-countries="{"all" : {"forbidden" : true}, "DE" : {"vat" : 7.0}}"></div>In the sample above, the product will be completely forbidden in all countries operated by Global‑e and will have reduced VAT in Germany.
This information can be loaded by the merchant site’s back end from Global-e by periodically calling RecentProductCountryS API mentioned in the separate “Global-e API” document. Alternatively, the merchant may choose to render only commercial restrictions in the data-countries data attribute, in which case the default GEM behaviour will still be preserved for the rest.
Reduced VAT Rate Support
For merchants having reduced VAT rate products in the catalogue (e.g. Children Clothing for the UK merchants), the applicable reduced VAT rate can be indicated in the data-product-vat data attribute for these products. The bespoke script will take the specified VAT rate into consideration when calculating the price for the customer.
Below is an example of how the VAT rate data attribute should appear on the website:
<div data-product-vat="0">...</div>
<div data-product-vat="20">...</div>