We run a website that members pay a fee to access for a fixed number of months. This year our global turnover crossed the UK VAT threshold and our accountant asked for a break down of our sales by country. Our UK sales were ~£32000, we have therefore not registered for UK VAT.
The issue this has turned up is that we sold ~£19,000 of memberships to Indian customers in our last accounting year. We have been advised that all sales to Indian customers are liable to 18% GST as we are a non-resident provider. We have approached one UK based company to enquire into the cost of processing this - we were quoted ~£7500 per annum.
All other international sales fall well below the countries threshold, for some reason India has a £0 threshold!
A few questions:
- Does anyone have experience of paying Indian GST, especially with relation to digital sales, and which company did you use to administer this?
- If we asked customers to select their country at registration and stopped them from proceeding if they were in India, and the customer then lied and selected another country, would we be liable - i.e would we have to cross check all purchases to confirm a customer had not lied about their address?