EU VAT Laws and CPA Marketing?

[CPAchick]

Hello. I tried doing a search on this earlier so if this has already been discussed, please forgive me. At any rate....

I just read about some new law that takes effect on the first day of 2015 which requires people such as myself who do not reside in the EU to pay taxes to them on the sale of digital products to those that do reside in Europe. As a result I think I'm going to stop with affiliate marketing. That is, selling info courses through my affiliate links. But I don't want to stop completely.

If this law does not affect CPA marketing, I would begin just focusing on that.

Does anyone know about how this new law affects CPA marketers?

 

[seeqer]

I am not an expert but here is what I understand.

As affiliate we promote other people or companies' products or services. These other people or companies are the ones doing the selling. Not us. These people or companies are the ones that have to collect taxes because they sell their products or services to customers.

Us we only get a commission. We do not sell. We are just the middlemen between the customers and the companies. Our job is to run the campaign and make the offer visible. We basically do the dirty work of promoting someone else products and services on our OWN money and time. We do not get a salary (unless we get paid to do an advertising).

Anyway, unless you actually SELL something (a product or services) like Sears, Walmart or Amazon do, you do not have to worry about that law. If you earn 5$ for every people that use your link to join a dating site, you get a commission because someone joined. If someone pay to be part of a dating site, you just get a comission as a "thank you keep doing your promotion and please bring us more customers or more leads".

If you sell services such as web development or webdesign, if you go through freelance website like odesk.com they handle any taxes if your services are taxable.

If you want to sell ebooks, use a platform like clickbank, they handle that new pesky tax.

As a person that earns a comission, you do not sell any product or service. You just make it visible and you are not on the payroll of that company you are helping.

 

[CPAchick]

That's what I thought. Thank you so much for your thoughts on this.

 

[kris79]

I agree with @seeqer
As an affiliate (doesn't matter if CPA, CPS, or other) you don't sell the product and you are not responsible for taxes.
The only thing is to check how you tax service in your country treats such an income, but this has nothing to do with this new VAT hell from EU.
At least directly.

If you are focusing on promoting CPA offers to EU citizens (or people that are within EU borders) you might feel it, but lower conversions. Since they would be seeing additional amount on the checkout page, which can lead (and would lead) to lower conversions.
If you are just an affilaite promoting stuff to places that are not included in EU everythings stays the same.