Marketplace Compliance
Compliance support for sellers across EU marketplaces — Amazon, eBay, and others. Covers VAT obligations, deemed-supplier rules, platform documentation, and the fiscal requirements marketplaces verify before activating an account.
How Marketplaces Verify Sellers
Onboarding on an EU marketplace is a documentary process before it is a commercial one. A platform will normally ask for the VAT number it is going to show on invoices and listings, evidence that the number is real and current, the corporate documents behind the account, and — where the seller is not established in the EU — proof of the fiscal position that makes EU sales possible at all. For sellers of packaged goods, electronics, or batteries, that documentation package often extends to proof of EPR registration — CONAI, RAEE, or battery producer numbers — which platforms increasingly check before activating a listing. Verification is not a one-off: platforms re-run these checks periodically, and again after a change of legal entity, registered address, or bank details.
Where the platform acts as a deemed supplier, it is treated as having bought and resold the goods, so it charges and remits the VAT on those sales itself. That does not remove your obligations — it divides them. The supply to the platform still has to be documented and reported on your side, your VAT registration and periodic returns continue, and every flow outside the deemed-supplier perimeter remains yours in full. Cross-border B2C sales that fall outside that perimeter are usually where OSS or IOSS registration becomes necessary, rather than something the marketplace’s own VAT collection replaces. Reading deemed supplier as “the marketplace handles the VAT” is the misunderstanding that surfaces later, during a reconciliation or an account review.
Requirements diverge because each platform builds its own reading of the same rules into its own process. Two marketplaces can ask for different documents to establish an identical fact, accept different formats of the same certificate, and re-verify on different triggers. Clearing one platform’s checklist is not evidence of clearing another’s, and a policy change on one does not propagate to the rest.
Who Needs Marketplace Compliance
- Sellers listing goods on Amazon, eBay, Cdiscount, Allegro, or other EU marketplaces
- Companies expanding from a single marketplace to multi-marketplace EU presence
- Non-EU sellers whose marketplace accounts require an EU fiscal position
- Sellers facing account verification or VAT documentation requests from platforms
What We Cover
- Italian VAT and VIES setup as required by marketplace onboarding
- Documentation packages for platform verification (VAT number, fiscal certificates)
- Advisory on EU deemed-supplier VAT rules (where the platform collects VAT)
- Coordination with OSS/IOSS where applicable for cross-border B2C flows
- Ongoing compliance support as marketplace policies evolve
Legal Basis
Article 14a of Directive 2006/112/EC sets out the deemed-supplier rule: an electronic interface — a marketplace, platform or portal — that facilitates distance sales of goods imported from outside the EU in consignments of an intrinsic value not exceeding EUR 150, or that facilitates supplies of goods within the EU by a taxable person not established in the EU to a non-taxable person, is treated as having received and supplied those goods itself.
Italy transposed the rule in Article 2-bis of Presidential Decree 633/1972, introduced by Legislative Decree 83/2021 and applicable to transactions carried out from 1 July 2021, which treats the interface as the purchaser and reseller of the goods. The VAT collection obligation on those supplies therefore sits with the marketplace rather than the non-EU seller, whose own registration, invoicing and reporting duties continue for everything outside that perimeter.
From 1 January 2027, Council Directive (EU) 2025/516 widens Article 14a(2) to also cover supplies to taxable persons and non-taxable legal persons whose intra-Community acquisitions are not subject to VAT.
Why Choose Us
Marketplace requirements vary by platform and change frequently. We monitor the fiscal documentation requested by major EU marketplaces and keep your account on the right side of platform verification — without locking you into a single marketplace’s workflow.