Feature request from hostep, posted on GitHub May 09, 2015
Hi
This is mostly based on Magento 1 experience, but it looks like not much has changed in Magento 2 currently (testing 0.74.0-beta8).
I'm not a VAT expert, I'm simply getting this from feedback we get from store owners who complain about how bad this is currently implemented in Magento 1. So with Magento 2, it would be a good idea to try to get this right from the start.
Here are some suggestions, please review them, maybe there are better solutions then the ones I'm suggesting ...
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If you go through the checkout, you should get instant feedback when you enter a VAT number if it is valid or not, and not after you go through the whole purchase process and it is too late. With the instant feedback you can correct your VAT number before purchasing if you made a typo.
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We have experienced a lot of issues with the VAT API service which is currently used in Magento (= VIES VAT number validation), it happens very regularly that the API service is down or times out. So you should think about some kind of way to handle this. Maybe there are alternative API services? Maybe you can do a first preliminary check using regular expressions before going to the API service to lower the load on the service? Maybe add a switch in the backend where store owners can choose what happens when the API service is down: allow the customer to proceed, or let them try again until the API service is back up?
- Right now you aren't allowed to enter your country prefix in front of the VAT number, since it uses the country from your address. I believe you should clearly state this in a line of text or in a tooltip or something like that, so the customers know what to enter. Also: it makes a lot more sense to put the VAT number field after the country selector field, because it depends on that value (the same thing applies to the state/region field, but that's another issue).
If others have some opinions about these issues or have other suggestions, please leave a comment, so we can try to improve how Magento 2 handles the EU VAT number validation.
Credit where credit's due: most of these suggestions come from a commercial extension we used a few times in the past: https://www.geissweb.de/eu-vat-enhanced-magento-extension.html, but since the current implementation in Magento is pretty broken, we shouldn't depend on an extension to fix these bugs in Magento I believe?