vat number trouble #9
Description
I did some checks on two shops for the EU VAT number for intra-EU trade. The results were not encouraging. Quite a few invalid numbers are entered. Some get through because the service is down. But often the customer ends up paying VAT.
Some recommendations that might improve things:
- do a javascript check on the value entered. The only valid symbols are letters and figures. A quite common error is to have other signs like a dot, a dash or a space. Those could be automatically removed or the customer could be warned to remove them. Now we submit faulty data that are bound to be rejected.
- the prefix is an eternal source of trouble. Some countries have their iso-code included in the VAT number. Others not. As far as I can see for our purpose the prefix is needed: a considerable part of the rejected lacks the country code. My suggestion is to send both variations to the check. Alternatively - when it is certain that it is needed for our purpose - you could check with javascript that the first two symbols are letters and not figures.
- the check is case sensitive. Lower case letters are allowed in VAT numbers but I have never seen one and quite a few entries are rejected because they contain lower case where upper case was required. So if the customer has entered lower case characters you might want to check the variant with uppercase too.