Those of you who are running small companies and are NOT VAT registered and are selling mainly to consumers (not B2B) then I would just not charge VAT at all on any transaction. They are not going to do anything if your sales are fairly low.

I have a few businesses myself and for one of them I really don’t care, the buyer can be anywhere – the company is not VAT registered and all the address/details are done at the payment gateway. I don’t even pull that info, just e-mail address and payment accepted or declined. All I see and care about is their e-mail address to send the digital content to.

If however you’re pulling in £30k of sales then I would probably consider complying because then it starts becoming ‘worth it’ for them to do something about you.

I have another business which we have a custom billing system for, and this is a bit of a nightmare to be honest. Until we had time to sort out the code/billing we just stopped selling outside the UK entirely.