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RevenueCat doesn't know about VAT in some countries

  • September 9, 2022
  • 2 replies
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Platform: Android

Store: Google Play

Product Type: Monthly Subscription

RevenueCat Purchases Version: com.revenuecat.purchases:purchases:5.1.0

 

A customer of our app from Moldova (Republic of Moldova) reported today that the price displayed in the app (9.49 USD) was not the price that he ended up paying (11.39 USD). 

 

Looking at the email receipt he sent us from Google, the extra 1.90 USD is labeled as Tax.

 

I went in the Google Play Console where we can set our price for each country, and the price there is 9.49 USD → no sign of any VAT. I did a Google Search and the default VAT for Moldova is 20%, which matches the extra Tax from the transaction.

I then checked RevenueCat, including the webhook for that specific transaction, and there is no trace of tax. The price is 9.49 and also, in the webhook, the `tax_percentage` field is 0.

 

Then I found out that this is the case for all transactions made from that country, RevenueCat doesn’t know about the tax there.

 

The biggest problem now is that for users from Moldova, we would like to display the full price the user will end up paying, including tax. Is there a way to know that price from the Purchases SDK? Currently, we’re using the `priceAmountMicros` from the `StoreProduct` instance in the purchases SDK.

 

More info that can be useful:

  • The developer account is located outside of Moldova
  • This is what I found in Google Play’s docs regarding VAT in Moldova.

Full disclosure, I was not able to manually simulate this case. As I live in another country, I tried using a VPN on my test device but I still wasn’t able to see the price from Moldova on my device.

 

Thank you for your time!

Best answer by Jens

Hey @Radu S, this is an interesting case. In RevenueCat (and the webhooks), the transaction was probably reported as USD 9.49, because we had no information from Google that the tax would be charged on top – the in-app pricing information comes directly from Google, so basically Google is charging the VAT on top without ever disclosing that information to the RevenueCat SDK. The issue therefore is on the Google side and we can’t really do anything to fix that on the RevenueCat end…

Regarding testing this: the country is determined by the country of the Google account. Maybe it’s possible to test this in sandbox by setting up a Gmail account with an address in Moldova and then inviting it as a tester.

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Jens
RevenueCat Staff
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  • Jens
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  • September 9, 2022

Hey @Radu S, this is an interesting case. In RevenueCat (and the webhooks), the transaction was probably reported as USD 9.49, because we had no information from Google that the tax would be charged on top – the in-app pricing information comes directly from Google, so basically Google is charging the VAT on top without ever disclosing that information to the RevenueCat SDK. The issue therefore is on the Google side and we can’t really do anything to fix that on the RevenueCat end…

Regarding testing this: the country is determined by the country of the Google account. Maybe it’s possible to test this in sandbox by setting up a Gmail account with an address in Moldova and then inviting it as a tester.

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    Radu S
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  • September 15, 2022
Jens wrote:

Hey @Radu S, this is an interesting case. In RevenueCat (and the webhooks), the transaction was probably reported as USD 9.49, because we had no information from Google that the tax would be charged on top – the in-app pricing information comes directly from Google, so basically Google is charging the VAT on top without ever disclosing that information to the RevenueCat SDK. The issue therefore is on the Google side and we can’t really do anything to fix that on the RevenueCat end…

Regarding testing this: the country is determined by the country of the Google account. Maybe it’s possible to test this in sandbox by setting up a Gmail account with an address in Moldova and then inviting it as a tester.

Thanks for the response. In the meantime I contacted the Google Play Developer support team and explained the issue. They said they are currently investigating the issue. I have yet to hear back from them.

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