Marketplaces and B2B

Two kinds of orders that are not yours to report

IOSS is a B2C scheme for your own sales. Two categories of orders must stay out of your return: sales a marketplace facilitated (they belong on the marketplace’s return), and sales to VAT-registered businesses (they are outside IOSS entirely). Getting either wrong means over-reporting — remitting VAT that was never yours to remit, or that was never due through IOSS at all.

Marketplace orders: the deemed-supplier rule

Under Article 14a of the VAT Directive, a marketplace that facilitates a distance sale of imported goods up to EUR 150 is deemed to have received and supplied the goods itself. Legally, you sold to the marketplace and the marketplace sold to the consumer. The consequences:

  • The marketplace’s IOSS number goes on the customs declaration — not yours.
  • The marketplace charges and remits the VAT on its return.
  • Those orders must never appear in your IOSS figures.

This applies to Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and similar platforms, regardless of where you are established. Your own-site orders are where your own IOSS registration applies.

How the plugin excludes them

Orders placed directly on your WooCommerce store are yours by definition. The problem case is orders imported into WooCommerce from a marketplace by a sync or importer plugin — they look like ordinary orders but are not yours to report. The plugin excludes an order as marketplace-facilitated when:

  • The wizard’s marketplace question and the corresponding order-source setting identify it, or
  • The ioss_is_marketplace_order filter says so.

If you run a marketplace importer, wire the filter to whatever marker your importer sets — a few lines in a snippet plugin:

add_filter( 'ioss_is_marketplace_order', function ( $is_marketplace, $order ) {
    return $is_marketplace || (bool) $order->get_meta( '_my_importer_channel' );
}, 10, 2 );

Excluded marketplace orders show the marketplace exclusion reason in the order’s IOSS meta box, so you can audit that the boundary is being drawn where you expect.

B2B buyers

IOSS covers supplies to non-taxable persons only. A business buyer who provides a valid EU VAT number is outside the scheme: you do not charge destination VAT through IOSS, and the sale does not go in your return. The order ships as a normal import — depending on your Incoterms, the buyer or you pays import VAT at the border, and a VAT-registered buyer can generally recover it.

The practical default matters here: a customer who has not provided a VAT number may be treated as a consumer. So a checkout without a VAT number field is not non-compliant — every buyer is treated as B2C, which is the correct presumption. What you lose is the ability for genuine business buyers to identify themselves and drop out of IOSS.

The free plugin excludes orders that carry a VAT number (for example, one collected by another plugin) via the B2B check in the eligibility sequence. The Pro add-on adds the optional checkout VAT-number field itself, with VIES verification, so business buyers are identified and excluded at checkout rather than after the fact.

Where you see it

Both exclusions surface like every other one: the orders-list IOSS column and the per-order meta box show the verdict and the reason (marketplace or B2B), and the dashboard counts them among excluded orders. Your monthly figures stay clean without any manual bookkeeping.