- Iman Deschâtres
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A Constantly Moving Target. E-Commerce and Marketplaces: How Tax Shapes Market Access, Growth and Revenue.
A book due to be published mid-September. I wrote it this summer. It is about exactly what this month’s round-up keeps circling: why these rules never stop moving, and what that movement asks of the businesses caught in it.
The question this month is not whether platforms collect tax. It is whose tax they collect.
Vietnam extended withholding to platforms that never touch the money. Nigeria confirmed that a platform can be appointed to collect VAT on its sellers’ full sales. Mauritania built a complete digital VAT regime, deemed supplier rule and delisting power included, in one law. Nepal made ride-hailing apps collect VAT from their own drivers. Zanzibar and the Maldives went after booking platforms. Botswana starts charging on 1 October. And a UK tribunal reminded HMRC that calling someone a principal does not make them one.
The logic is administrative before it is fiscal. A tax authority would rather collect from one marketplace than chase fifty thousand sellers, so the obligation keeps moving to the intermediary that is visible, solvent and easy to reach. Deemed supplier, withholding agent, reporting platform. Different labels for the same design.
Here is a glimpse of what caught my attention…and as you read the plethora of changes and consider the challenges they present especially to marketplaces and their sellers, keep in mind that only the right system can enable growth and open new markets without financial or reputational risk. Of course, I note that any observations and comments are solely my own opinion and view, and not intended to be the provision of advice. You should not rely on these without checking with your own tax, legal and financial advisors.
Nigeria
A platform selling into Nigeria can be appointed to collect VAT on the full value of what its sellers supply, not just on its own commission.
Six months after the new VAT rules took effect on 1 January, the Nigeria Revenue Service has issue nine circulars explaining how it intends to apply them. One covers that appointment power.
It is not new, and it has already been tested. Under the previous VAT Act, Bolt was appointed to collect VAT on the full value of the rides its drivers supplied. It objected, and the Tax Appeal Tribunal upheld the appointment. The Nigeria Tax Act carries the same power forward.
Mauritania
Mauritania has gone from no digital VAT rules at all to a full deemed supplier regime in a single amending finance law, adopted at the end of July and published on 10 August.
Digital services are now taxable in their own right, from advertising and cloud to streaming and AI. A service counts as consumed in Mauritania on any one of six tests, among them the customer’s billing address, a Mauritanian IP address or phone number, and a locally issued payment instrument. A platform is always liable on its commission, and becomes the sole person liable on the underlying supply if it collects the price, sets the essential conditions, or acts as the contractual interface. Once it has paid, the seller is only liable for fraud or collusion.
The enforcement provisions are the sharp end. Banks and payment institutions must report monthly on payments to non-resident digital suppliers and platforms, and where a formal notice goes unanswered the administration can request suspension of access to the service, blocking of payment flows and delisting within the country. The law does not state when the new provisions take effect, and the ministerial order setting out how the simplified regime works has not appeared.
Botswana
Non-resident suppliers of remote services, and the marketplaces that facilitate them, start charging 14% Botswana VAT on 1 October.
Registration opened on 1 June for suppliers above BWP 500,000 of Botswana sales and the transitional period ends 30 September. Returns are quarterly, the first due in January 2027.
VAT-registered Botswana customers have been self-accounting under the reverse charge since 1 August, so October is about B2C. ATAF puts the revenue at around USD 29 million.
Zanzibar
Zanzibar’s rules for non-resident digital suppliers and foreign tour operators have been on the statute book since 2022. What changed is that the registration portal is now live and the guidelines complete, so the tax authority expects businesses to register now and gives them until 1 January 2027 to build their systems and start collecting 18% VAT. No threshold, no local representative, monthly returns. The definition is the part to read twice: a foreign tour operator is anyone who supplies guests to Zanzibar, which puts a booking platform in as the supplier of the holiday, not the intermediary. For electronic services the guidelines indicate the opposite, and unusually clearly: no deemed supplier rule, the platform liable on its commission only, the underlying supplier liable for its own sales.
The Maldives
The Maldives wants foreign booking platforms, travel agents and tour operators to charge GST on the tourism goods and services they sell into the country. A bill submitted to the Majlis in mid-August applies the destination principle, so the tax follows the holiday rather than the seller. If the bill passes, it may take effect on 1 October.
Nepal
Ride-hailing platforms in Nepal now collect VAT from their own drivers, at a different rate from the one they charge on their fee.
Every platform must register and deduct 5% VAT from each driver on every passenger transport and delivery transaction. The platform’s own commission stays at 13% VAT. Drivers need a PAN but are not required to register for VAT to work through a platform.
Withholding on seller income
A platform liable for VAT is the norm now. Nobody argues about it. The obligations keep growing though, and the next one is withholding tax on what the seller earns. The attraction for a government is not hard to see. The tax arrives monthly rather than a year after the fact, and it arrives from one platform rather than from a million sellers. The sellers may be local. The platform is still easier to reach.
For the platform, if the payout to the seller cannot be adjusted, it may have to absorb the cost. The seller also needs to understand clearly that this is not a commission but its own tax.
Vietnam
A platform that never touches the money can now be liable for withholding tax on seller income. The scope of the law introduced a year ago has been extended.
An online ordering function is now enough on its own, and a platform counts as handling payment even where it only participates indirectly, provided it can control, reconcile or confirm the transaction.
The obligations run from withholding and remitting tax monthly, by the 20th, through to producing a record for every transaction showing order ID, value, tax withheld and seller reference.
Ukraine
Ukraine’s IMF programme required reporting on the DAC7 model. Ukraine added withholding. Law No. 15111-d makes platforms tax agents: registration with the tax service opens on 1 November and closes at year end, and from 1 January 2027 platforms withhold 10% of qualifying sellers’ income and remit it monthly.
Parliament passed it on 9 June. The president has still not signed it. Registration also cannot start until Ukraine joins the OECD exchange agreement. Two months to go and the law is not in force.
Indonesia
Indonesia went the other way. Its 0.5% withholding on domestic sellers’ turnover was due to start on 1 August. Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada and Blibli had been appointed collectors in July and had built for it. On 5 August the finance minister pushed it to the end of October, with collection from 1 November, to protect purchasing power. What had been withheld goes back to sellers. The four appointments are revoked, to be reissued later. Second postponement in a year, and platform readiness was not the reason. The seller’s cash was. Withholding takes money out of a seller’s hands months before any return is due.
European Union
From 1 January 2027 a marketplace is the deemed supplier when a non-EU seller sells through it to a buyer who does not self-account for intra-EU acquisition VAT: a public body, a flat-rate farmer, a business under the SME exemption or an exempt professional, not only a consumer. The revised Explanatory Notes published on 24 July confirm the extension of Article 14a and call this the “group of 4”.
Full B2B it is not. The Directive stops at buyers whose intra-EU acquisitions are not subject to VAT, and asks the Commission to report by 1 July 2027 on whether to extend the rule further. That report is where the real B2B question will be decided.
The practical problem is that a VAT number no longer settles it. A buyer can hold one and still sit in the group of 4, and the Notes offer no presumption and no way to check. The platform charges the customer’s VAT, declares it through the OSS, and carries the risk of guessing wrong.
The other six topics in the Notes are clarifications, the useful one being that only distance sales dispatched from the seller’s own Member State count towards the €10,000 threshold. The Commission says itself the Notes will need rewriting for July 2028.
Low Value Goods
Ukraine
Ukraine is removing its low value goods VAT exemption. The bill makes marketplaces liable for the VAT and would take effect on 1 January 2027 at the earliest.
Fewer than 1% of the 75 million parcels arriving each year are taxed today. The reform is worth around UAH 10 billion a year and is the last of three tax reforms the IMF programme requires, after a first attempt failed in the Rada in May.
Enforcement
United Kingdom
HMRC tried to turn a disclosed agent into a principal. £13.5 million of VAT was at stake.
Tapi Carpets sells flooring and arranges fitters for its customers. It charged VAT on its arrangement fee but not on the fitting fees customers paid directly to the independent fitters. HMRC argued the fitters were really subcontractors supplying Tapi, pointing to Tapi setting prices, selecting fitters and handling complaints. The tribunal found the contracts matched commercial reality and allowed the appeal, noting that HMRC had argued from the arrangements it thought Tapi should have adopted.
Most of the fitters were not VAT registered, so the tax was only collectable if the intermediary could be recast as the principal. That is the reasoning deemed supplier rules exist to make unnecessary, and it is another example of a tax authority applying deemed supplier logic where no deemed supplier rule exists. Any company that arranges services for others should read its contracts with that in mind.
One point worth remembering. The EU rule on undisclosed agents, Article 28, turns on whether the intermediary acts in its own name, not on whether the customer knows who the underlying supplier is. The principal can be perfectly well known and the intermediary still treated as the supplier.
United Kingdom
Under the OECD platform reporting rules, in force in the UK since 2024, marketplaces send HMRC the income of their sellers every January. The second year of reports covers 3.99 million sellers and close to £55 billion of sales income, against 1.46 million sellers and £25.5 billion the year before.
HMRC is now matching those figures against what the same sellers declared on their tax returns, automatically, and another round of letters to sellers whose numbers do not line up is expected. Advisers are telling sellers to come forward first.
For a platform this is where reporting comes back round. The seller who gets a letter will ask what was filed in their name, and whether it was right.
Tajikistan
No new law, just letters. The Tax Committee is writing directly to foreign companies and pointing them at its registration portal.
The regime has run since 2021 at 14%, with registration due within 30 days of the first supply. It already carries a platform liability rule: a non-resident platform that authorises payment, authorises delivery or sets the terms of supply can be treated as the supplier, unless the underlying supplier agrees to account itself.
European Union
Council Regulation (EU) 2026/1743, in force since 16 August, gives the European Public Prosecutor’s Office and OLAF direct access to cross-border VAT data, including Eurofisc’s fraud analyses. Access is through a single entry point, for targeted searches in specific cases, and starts on 17 August 2027, with VIES following in 2030. The target is carousel fraud. The effect is that data filed for VAT compliance will travel further than the tax administration that collected it.
Other
- Russia wants VAT on goods that foreign sellers ship to Russian consumers through marketplaces, which today arrive tax-free below the €200 customs threshold. The Finance Ministry sent a bill to the Cabinet in April phasing the tax in at 7% in 2027, 14% in 2028 and the full 22% from 2029. The Industry Ministry wants 22% from day one. Both foreign and Russian marketplaces would collect it. The bill has not reached the Duma, and the argument is still about the ramp, not the principle.
- Poland published its draft digital services tax bill on 31 July: a 3% levy from 1 January 2027 on groups above €1 billion global and PLN 25 million Polish revenue, covering targeted advertising, multilateral interfaces and user data. Streaming, regulated financial services, editorial media and direct online sales are excluded. That last exclusion echoes the Italian tax court ruling covered in June: a retailer selling through its own site is not an intermediary.
- Azerbaijan switched from optional to mandatory VAT registration for foreign digital service providers on 23 August, under amendments adopted in February. The first company to say so publicly is Meta, which will charge 18% VAT on Facebook advertising sold to Azerbaijani advertisers from 1 September.
Disclaimer: The views, statements or opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent tax advice and are not to be designated to be the views, statements or opinions of any other person, group, association or company.
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