Re VAT and the concerns from some that Niche are charging VAT to overseas buyers and pocketing it. It’s far more likely to be exactly the opposite.
Explainer: I sell to Australians and USA/Canada, Europe and UK. Basically, shopping carts have traditionally made it really difficult to charge VAT/GST to one country and not to another. When I first encountered this problem about 12 years ago, the only solution I found has been to have two completely seperate sales pages/carts/links. One for Australians and another for every other country.
But that got really messy, really quicly, even with geo tracking cookies.
People don’t take the time to read and they easily click the wrong link and they may be using a VPN and my oh my, managing that ended up being a time consuming job for someone to figure out the VAT/GST due to the Australian government.
The solution I decided on was to simply charge one price and to absorb the GST cost on Australian sales. One price for every country, in my case we chose US$ because international buyers relate to that much easier than AU$ or even Euro or GBP.
So maybe Niche have simply done the same. One price, absorb the VAT cost for UK buyers who will be in the minority. If so, in effect they are doing exactly the opposite of what some have accused of: they are not charging VAT to offshore buyers (come on, that’s nonesense) but rather are wearing the VAT payment to the UK government because they believe it’s worth it for the sake of a cleaner, simpler and less confusing sales process.
So people can look at it this way: they are lazy or ripping people off.
Or they can look at it this way: they are choosing a more streamlined option and absorbing the VAT on UK sales.
However much people think that Martin and Jame Nicholson are unscrupulous, those thoughts absolutely say more about the thinker than they do about the Nicholsons.
In the Westminster tradition, I will assume they are good blokes until proven otherwise and all evidence to date affirms my assumption.
