Support

Please try logging out and back in to our site, in case there is something stuck in the current user session.

If he problem persists please make sure that you have set the Subscribing as a business option to Yes in the subscription page, your country selection is Italy and that you are entering your VAT number without the IT prefix. After entering the VAT number click elsewhere on the page, for example the blank space next to the VAT box. Within 3-7 seconds you should see the price breakdown update with no VAT.

Thank you for the debugging, but it's off the mark by quite a bit :) I was not in front of a computer so I couldn't check a few things. Now that I'm back, please let me explain what is going on.

The European Union VIES API is SOAP and only accessed from the backend PHP code. It is not available as a Javascript-facing API and of course we cannot call something which does not exist.

Moreover, this API only has a single version. This is the only version ever provided, the only version still provided and the only version currently used.

The URL being accessed by the Javascript is on our site. It is sent the data in your subscription form, which is then verified for validity, stored in the user session and the result is sent back to the server. Part of the validation is contacting the EU VIES server. It is not returning a 404. What you see is a browser artefact when it tries to access in the dev tools via GET a URL only designed to be accessed via POST.

However, this is irrelevant. The problem is that the URL does return a result which says there's a validation error with the VAT number. Every time there is a validation error we keep a log file and I could indeed find yours. The problem is that the VAT number is not being recorded in the user state. Trying to follow your steps on my account I can enter your VAT number and it does validate.

Looking at the logs I saw something interesting. Your session and a previous user's session from 5 hours ago have the same ID. That's a 1 in 4294967296 chance. She had not entered a VAT number and that was being picked up in your session. This points to a Joomla or PHP bug (I have to test which of the two does it) which I suspected for the last year. I couldn't reproduce it which is why two months ago I started logging validation failures. Your case was the first in these two months. So thank you very much for breaking the case!

While I investigate what's going on let's try to work around that elusive bug. We need to change your session ID. Here's the catch. Even if you log out the session ID won't change since it's stored in a cookie on your browser. You can either clear the cookies on your browser OR use a different browser. In either case, next time you visit our site a new random session ID will be assigned to you and that will fix the issue you are experiencing.

If all else fails just subscribe anyway and reply back to this ticket so I can do a partial refund and issue the necessary paperwork to make sure that you are not charged VAT after all.

In any case, please do contact me after subscribing. I want to give you 6 free months of subscription time for helping me debug this issue that's driving me insane the last year :)

I have added the free six months to your subscription.

Regarding the VIES code, please consult https://github.com/akeeba/akeebasubs/blob/development/component/backend/Helper/EUVATInfo.php#L137 and ignore the bit about caching the results (this if for performance reasons in Akeeba Subscriptions).

The actual code will first try to get a results from the EU VIES SOAP service. It will try up to three times if the service doesn't respond. If after three tries the service has still not responded it will try to submit the web form and examine its results. If that still fails then we are sure that either the EU VIES service or the VIES database of the client's country is down, in which case we have to assume that the VAT number is invalid.

The same helper class contains a few more goodies. The static table at the top contains the main VAT rates for all EU countries, including the sovereign territories which are outside the EU but belong to the VAT taxation scheme of the EU country they are dependent on. It does not, however, contain the VAT-exempt territories or regions (e.g. Canary Islands or some regions of Germany and Italy with special VAT rates). The first few methods of that class give programmatic access to that information which I regularly maintain.

As a side note, you may also want to do foreign currency conversions to / from Euro. I have a class for that which uses the ECB's foreign exchange rates (these are the nominal values, not the real sell/buy rate and do not include the bank's commission but are a good ballpark, usually within 3% of the real converted price). The exchange rates are cached in the database as you can see since they only get updated at most once a day on ECB's site.

Good luck!