In simple English
Selling digital products in Europe requires collecting the right tax rate for each buyer's country. This tool helps PHP programs look up those tax rates automatically. It checks if a customer-submitted tax number is real by talking to official government databases. It also guesses a buyer's country from their computer network address. It costs nothing to use, but you need your own programmer to add it to your website.
What it is
A PHP library for handling European tax rules, rates, and customer verifications. It connects to online databases to confirm tax numbers and fetches current tax percentages.
What it is good for
Solo developers building an online store in PHP who need to collect the correct European taxes without writing tax lookup logic from scratch.
- Checks tax numbers against official European databases so you know they are real.
- Fetches up-to-date tax rates for every European Union country automatically.
- Guesses customer countries from their IP addresses (an IP address is a unique number that identifies a device on the internet, such as a computer or phone).
- Requires PHP version 8.2 or higher, with the CURL, JSON, and SOAP extensions enabled on your server.
- Depends on community-maintained tax rates, so changes depend on volunteers keeping records up to date.
- Only works for PHP projects, so it is useless if your website runs on a different programming language.
Writing custom tax rate lookup tables and manual VIES verification code.
Composer (a tool for managing programming libraries and packages in PHP projects).
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composer require ibericode/vat