How To Know Correct VAT Registration Number?

Is PayPal providing VAT number or company registration number on invoices?

• As a French corp selling digital goods worldwide, our customers will pay different prices based on their country and if they provide us with their company registration number. Is Paypal giving us this information or should we ask it on our site prior ro send customers to paypal?

• Answer:

  PayPal does not offer capabilities to do dynamic pricing based on user location - this is something you need to do before you redirect the buyer to PayPal. Based on how you framed your question, it appears that you are selling Digital Goods to businesses. If you are a large company with enough controls in place, you can request PayPal (via your account manager) for the vetted feature to get access to the customers' billing address. Once enabled, PayPal will append the customers billing address to you in the API response in case you are using PayPal Express Checkout or PayPal Reference Transactions.  Do realize that you still have the issue of first time payment - PayPal may share the billing address with you only after the first payment and users consent. A few other considerations: You need to determine whether you want to charge based on users billing address or based on their usage location. If its billing address, you are better off just doing it by asking the user. You could cross-check it with what they have on PayPal if needed. If usage location, an alternative approach, outside of PayPal is to use GeoIP capabilities (from vendors such as MaxMind) to suggest (or enforce - depending on your use case) the users location and then do the calculations on your own. The advantage of doing it outside of PayPal is that this would now work for all your payment providers. The GeoIP capabilities and APIs are fairly reliable, robust and accurate now although not foolproof - people can use VPNs to spoof their location.