Not charging VAT to channel islands

[14Steve14]

Bit of a silly question this, so am just looking for ideas. I currently charge UK VAT.

I have customers from Jersey and Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, who should not be charged VAT but they come under the UK for a country so get charged. We are currently having to refund the VAT, and I do know this has put off at least three customers, and that's the ones I know of.

How do other people get around this? Is it easier to create new countries for them, which would make them non UK, so will not be charged VAT, then update the current customers to their country rather than the UK in the database, or is there an easier way. Like I say looking for ideas and suggestions.

[raiwa]

You need to add to your UK VAT zone, UK as a country, but instead to select "All Zones" you have to add zone by zone excluding the Islands where you do not wish to apply VAT.

[burt]

Raiwa way is the best way. If you were to add Channel Islands as 'separate' countrie(s), you would also need to amend shipping rates to add in those new countries and it might be that payment processors would not recognise those new fake countries as real countries. I remember I had this issue when splitting out Northern Ireland from the UK (seller based in Eire)...

In effect, you would have all the normal counties of the UK; Glos, Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria etc and have Channel Islands as an extra county. Of course, you have to *hope* that new customers would know to select CI as their county. You would also need to scan thru the database for existing customers and add in the relevant new County Code to their address.

You would need to amend the Tax Zone as described by Raiwa. In effect deselecting "all", and then selecting everything bar the new CI county.

All in all, not to difficult, and is definitely the way forward for you.

[14Steve14]

Many thanks @raiwa and @burt

And I got told by a certified developer here one day that I didn't need counties anymore as they were not used for anything. Good job I still use them and have an updated list. Just got to find the time now to do this. Hopefully this will be another job ready for the new website that is a current work in progress.

I think finding the current customers who live in the Channel Islands will be the easy bit.

[Yahalimu]

Hi,
We have some separate UK areas set up as separate countries. eg.

UK_Scottish Highlands
UK- Scottish Offshore Islands
UK-Northern Ireland
UK- Isle of Wight
UK-Channel Islands
UK-Gibraltar

Precisely because some of them don't charge of VAT and different zone rate shipping charges for each area are needed.

We had to create new ISO codes that are not normally used, (eg. YA, YB, YC etc ) and change the payment processing code to sent the correct UK ISO code (GB) to the processor instead of the new ISO codes otherwise payments would fail verification.

[14Steve14]

@Yahalimu Thanks for that. We have hopefully got it all sorted now. We are using an addon to put the popular countries to the top of the country drop down list so hopefully those from the channel island should see the country there and use it instead of UK.

Once we transfer all the data across to a new database we will see if it works. As we data check every new customer address we should be able to see if they have used the right country.