@Hennek, I had been planning to use FastSpring for a while, but brought forward the date when I found out about all the VAT changes. I’ve been using them since early December and have been happy with the service.

FastSpring acts as a reseller of my downloadable software, and therefore they deal with all the VAT issues and different territories. All the invoices to ‘my’ EU customers show FastSpring as the seller with FastSpring’s own EU VAT number. Likewise, customers in other countries like the U.S.A get appropriately compliant tax invoices. My details just appear as ‘Product Support’ on the invoices.

It’s interesting to see that FastSpring do indeed collect all the information like IP addresses cross-referenced to countries, full customer billing address etc for their own compliance.

Even if customers use the PayPal option on the FastSpring page, that is FastSpring’s PayPal, not mine. All I do is receive a simple payment from them twice a month. They payments arrive via FastSpring’s UK bank, so no bank charges, and takes 2-3 days.

Admittedly, they aren’t cheap at 5.9% plus $0.95, but it does save me a load of accounting hassle, plus I seem to get less declined transactions with them.

Of course, all sales to non-VAT registered EU customers now have VAT added, but I can’t say I’ve noticed lost sales because of that.

I did a fairly sophisticated integration with my own website backend to generate license keys and save information to a database, but you can just use a simple web-link to a FastSrping checkout page for your product if that’s all you need.

Hope someone finds this useful.