VAT on an ebook, template, or online course: what a landing page actually needs to handle

A €29 ebook, an €89 template, a €297 online course: sold from a landing page with a Stripe payment link, these digital products can reach any country the very day they go live. What's almost never anticipated is that the applicable VAT rate doesn't depend on where you're based, but on where the buyer lives — a rule in force since 2015 for electronically supplied services, and one that quickly catches up with a seller who never set it up from the start.

The rule since 2015: VAT is due where the customer lives, not where you are

Since January 1, 2015, an electronically supplied service — a downloadable ebook, a template delivered as a zip file, a recorded online course, a SaaS subscription — is taxed at the VAT rate of the country where the individual buyer resides, not the seller's country. In practice, a French course creator selling an ebook to a German consumer must, in theory, apply the German VAT rate rather than the French one; to a Hungarian consumer, the Hungarian rate. This rule, originally designed to stop large platforms from routing digital sales through low-VAT countries, now applies to any seller, including an independent creator selling a single ebook through a landing page and a payment link.

Ebook or template: yes. Live coaching: not automatically

The rule only applies to what's called an "electronically supplied service": something delivered automatically, with no meaningful human intervention at the time of the transaction. A PDF ebook, a landing page template downloaded after payment, a pre-recorded course consumed independently: yes. A live video coaching call, a personalized consulting session, anything that involves real human involvement at the point of delivery: no — those services fall under the general VAT rules for services, not the specific electronic-services regime. Many coaches and consultants blur the two: selling an ebook through the same landing page as a discovery call doesn't put both under the same VAT regime.

The €10,000 threshold: below it, your domestic VAT rate is enough

To avoid forcing every micro-seller into multi-country tax management from the very first euro, the EU set a €10,000 annual threshold, cumulative across all distance sales and digital services sold to consumers in other EU countries (excluding the country where you're established). Below that threshold, you can keep applying your own domestic VAT rate to all your European customers. Above it — and the threshold accumulates over the current or previous calendar year, not product by product — you must apply each customer's country rate and report that VAT through the one-stop shop.

The micro-entrepreneur trap: two thresholds that don't talk to each other

This is the point most often overlooked, and the costliest one if it stays that way too long: a French micro-entrepreneur's VAT exemption (up to €37,500 in annual revenue for services in 2026) and the €10,000 cross-border digital sales threshold are not the same rule and don't cancel each other out. A micro-entrepreneur who stays well under €37,500 in annual revenue — and who, on that basis, charges no VAT to French customers — can still exceed €10,000 in ebook or template sales to consumers in other EU countries. In that case, the obligation to register for the one-stop shop and charge each customer's country VAT applies regardless, independently of the domestic exemption, which otherwise keeps applying normally to French sales.

Registering for the OSS one-stop shop: what it actually changes

The one-stop shop (OSS, which replaced the smaller MOSS scheme in 2021) avoids the historical requirement to register for VAT separately in each of the other 26 EU countries where you have customers. One online registration, through your professional account on impots.gouv.fr, one quarterly return listing sales and VAT collected country by country, and one payment that the French tax authority then redistributes to the countries concerned. The trade-off is that you need to know, for every sale, the VAT rate of the buyer's country — a rate that ranges from 17% in Luxembourg to 27% in Hungary across the 27 member states — and be able to justify the customer's location with at least two non-contradictory pieces of evidence (billing address, IP address, card-issuing country).

Automating the calculation instead of doing it by hand

Calculating and justifying 27 different VAT rates by hand, sale by sale, isn't realistic for anyone beyond a handful of transactions a month. Tools like Stripe Tax plug directly into a Stripe payment link you already have set up — the same one used for automatic digital product delivery, covered in our dedicated article — and automatically determine the applicable rate from the billing address entered at checkout, display it to the customer before payment, then generate the data needed for the quarterly return. The setup is done once, at the account level, and applies to every sale afterward with no manual step — see also our article on choosing between a one-time payment or a subscription, which affects how often that VAT needs to be recalculated.

Why this isn't just an administrative formality

A study published in 2024 in the Journal of Public Economics by Chao Fang and Shuzhong Ma measured the effect of a comparable cross-border VAT reform — the July 2021 removal of the VAT exemption on small parcels imported into the EU — using Chinese customs data and orders from an AliExpress seller: Chinese online exports to the EU fell by nearly 50%, and European buyers, more than sellers, bore most of the resulting tax increase (Fang & Ma, 2024). The lesson carries over directly to digital products: a change in cross-border VAT rules measurably reshapes who sells, who buys, and at what price — a seller who finds out after the fact that months or years of uncollected foreign VAT need to be settled takes on a real financial risk, well beyond a simple administrative checkbox.

What it changes for how you display your price

The applicable VAT rate directly affects the final price the customer pays, which connects to the question — covered in our article on showing prices with or without tax — of whether your landing page should advertise one fixed price or a price that varies by country. In B2C, the most honest approach remains a fixed tax-included price, letting the payment tool absorb the rate variation by country rather than showing a different price to every visitor — the same logic covered in our article on local currency pricing: the simplicity shown to the visitor shouldn't depend on the tax complexity handled behind the scenes.

Starting from a funnel that's already ready for customers across Europe

The 10 LanderKit templates (€89 per template, €229 for the full pack) are built to plug into an existing Stripe payment link, automatic VAT included — see it in action on the Ebook & Digital Product template demo or the SaaS Waitlist template demo, two typical cases of selling a digital product to a potentially European audience from the very first customer.