A Constantly Moving Target

The most expensive thing in your marketplace is the one nobody mentions.

Tax is the elephant in the room of e-commerce. Everyone running a platform or selling across borders knows it is there. Nobody wants to talk about it. Then a rule changes in a country you barely sell to, a platform becomes the deemed supplier overnight, an audit reaches back five years, and the elephant is suddenly the only thing in the room, hungry and having a tantrum.

The cost of getting tax wrong in an e-commerce business is rarely visible until it becomes a harrowing reality. Revenue that disappears before anyone notices. A valuation questioned. Investors unsettled. Markets that quietly close. These are the real-life stories that keep tax and business people awake at night. This book tells them.

None of this stays inside the tax department. Tax sets which markets you can open, what happens at your checkout, who owns the transaction, how your sellers get paid, and how much of the revenue you keep.

Since 2015, cross-border tax rules have moved faster than businesses and platforms have been able to absorb them, and they have not slowed. Anyone can look up the current rate for a given country in a given month. The hard part is understanding why the rules are moving in the direction they are. The why holds when the detail does not. It lets you see the next obligation before it arrives, decide what to build now, and, most importantly, know where your business is exposed.

A Constantly Moving Target is a book of stories from the field, not a manual. Drawn from twenty years of pragmatic experience in transactional taxes, including ten years deep inside the e-commerce revolution, it follows the why that ultimately decides market access and revenue:

• Why platforms and marketplaces became tax collectors, and what deemed supplier rules for VAT, GST and sales tax require of them. How a platform that sees itself as an intermediary ends up liable for the tax itself, and what that does to its business model.
• What taxation at the place of consumption actually asks of you: what you sell, where your customer is, invoices and receipts, registration and filing, FX and remittance, audit.
• Why and where the obligations will likely go next: platform reporting and information sharing, withholding of seller income tax, new taxes to collect, and consumer protection duties.

It is written to be read without a tax background. If you lead, advise, fund or audit an e-commerce business or a marketplace, the elephant is already in your room.

Tax used to be a cost centre. Tax now decides whether your business earns revenue.

Iman Ben Abbes Deschâtres has spent over twenty years working on transactional taxes, was a principal at Taxamo, and is the founder of DepTax, where she advises boards, C-suite executives and fiscal authorities on cross-border e-commerce.