Critical Commerce update for EU VAT users

Mark Hamstra | April 17, 2020

If you sell to customers in the European Union, there's a good chance you've set that up with the built-in EU VAT module. That module uses a service, jsonvat.com, to provide you with up-to-date tax rates for all countries in the EU.

Last night, that service was suddenly shut down.

If you use the EU VAT module, your shop will no longer get any tax rates as soon as the cache expires, which is set to a 3-day lifetime.

That means your shop will stop charging VAT starting somewhere between last night and coming Sunday.

We've just released Commerce v1.1.4 which you should update to immediately. Don't wait until tomorrow or after the weekend; if you use EU VAT rates, login to your site and update right now to avoid missing tax charges. If you haven't upgraded to v1.1 yet, we also backported the fix into a v1.0.4 update.

Here's the link to upgrade Commerce remotely on your SiteDash-connected sites.

jsonvat.com was a free service, and maintaining the list of tax rates is definitely a lot of work that should not fall on any individual, so I fully understand Adam's reasoning. Unfortunately this was rather sudden, leaving us to scramble for a solution.

We've now prepared a new basic API under our own control that Commerce interacts with. We may look at including other and/or multiple sources in future updates.

Commerce v1.1.4 also includes some other fixes we had already prepared:

  • [invoices] Fix incorrect placeholder causing VAT registration numbers to be missing from the invoices [S22494]
  • [invoices] Make sure invoice generation organises by year based on the created date, not the current date
  • [invoices] Provide a utility to regenerate all invoices from SSH
  • [emails] Add nl2br filter to the payment/shipping method email note in the default order-received template