BlackBerry® World™ Development

[don_miguel]

Hi,

We are now Approved vendors for BlackBerry !

We have a few questions about selling apps in AppWorld :

- How much paypal and Blackberry charges fees on each app sold ?

- Is the VAT (tax) included on the application price (so the price is tax included) or not ?

- If yes, how much is the VAT ? Is it possible to recuperate the VAT ?

Thanks a lot for yours answers.

Sincerely yours,

Michel

[opti-knights]

We are a UK company and as this is a very serious issue we had to  block all developments for RIM platforms until this question is answered.

Our problem is that EU VAT has to be paid for all sales online.

We started development for android as the android store of amazon manage everything and pay net of all VAT while reporting and paying what needs to be paid to the european tax authorities.

What we know from our discussion with the tax authorities :

- if the buyer is a non european individual or a non european company the rate has to be zero percent.

- if the buyer is an european customer the full rate has to be paid (20% as we are a UK company).

- If the buyer is an european company the rate is zero percent but we need to know the European VAT number of this company.

Of course we can decide to bill full rate (20%) on all sales, we can also bill zero rate on all sales...

Of course the UK tax authorities is unhappy with these extreme solution.

If it is possible to restrict the sale of a software to a specific country we can imagine to have two version of the software. One for non european countries and one for european countries...

Is anybody able to explain how they made it work and managed this big issue ?

[QuiteSimple]

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don_miguel wrote:
- How much paypal and Blackberry charges fees on each app sold ?

- Is the VAT (tax) included on the application price (so the price is tax included) or not ?

- If yes, how much is the VAT ? Is it possible to recuperate the VAT ?

---

BlackBerry takes 30% of each sale, PayPal does not charge you. However you will pay some small fee when you try to withdraw the money from your PayPal account.

VAT is included in the app price, i.e. if your app costs 0,99$ the user will pay 1.19$. It seems that VAT is 20%

[QuiteSimple]

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opti-knights wrote:

If it is possible to restrict the sale of a software to a specific country we can imagine to have two version of the software. One for non european countries and one for european countries...

Is anybody able to explain how they made it work and managed this big issue ?

---

Yes, it is possible to separate versions for different countries and to restrict the software sales to only given number of countries.

Re VAT issue - I don't have much experience in tax laws, but consider this - you are not selling software. RIM (via BB App World) sells it. And you receive 70% of the sale as copyright or whatever you call it.

[Tjitte]

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QuiteSimple wrote:

VAT is included in the app price, i.e. if your app costs 0,99$ the user will pay 1.19$. It seems that VAT is 20%

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When I buy an app that costs €0,95 in App World, I pay €0,95. On the Confirm Purchase page you see:

- App name: €0,83

-Tax: €0,12

- Total (EUR): €0,95

On the bottom of the page I see that the product is sold, in this case, by Digital River S.a.r.l. based in Luxenbourg. The VAT in Luxembourg is 15%. So in this case that's correct. But will the developer get 70% of €0,83 and Digital River handles the tax or will the developer get 70% €0,95 but you need to handle the tax by yourself?

[QuiteSimple]

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Tjitte wrote:
But will the developer get 70% of €0,83 and Digital River handles the tax or will the developer get 70% €0,95 but you need to handle the tax by yourself?

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First one. You get 70% of the base price i.e. 70% of 0.83 Euro. RIM sales the software, RIM takes the VAT, I don't think we have to do anything with it.

[opti-knights]

I never heard about digital river before today.

I went to their website and found on google a news article from 2009 explaining they had a deal with RIM.

Who can share his/her knowledge regarding "digital river" ?

Who saw reference about "digital river" on a RIM document or RIM website ?

Where can we find info about them, because if they run the RIM store, and as they seems to be registerered in europ, it could be possible that they hide the VAT complexitiy from our eyes ...

[QuiteSimple]

If you are BB App World vendor, just login into your account, go to Manage Account Details, tab "Terms and Condition" and you will see

- VENDOR AGREEMENT FOR BLACKBERRY APP WORLD™

- DIGITAL RIVER TERMS AND CONDITIONS

- BANGO TERMS AND CONDITIONS

If you are not a vendor and still want to read the Digital River Terms and Condition, just send me a PM with your email and I will send it to you.

[jhutch]

Maybe a vendor like yourself can ask RIM or Blackberry whatever they want to call themselves why an awe full amount of people cannot purchase apps. If you search you'll see people get Error 10000 from their phones and PlayBook. This has been going on for years which NO solution. There are plenty of suggestions that are not working. Just like myself, one day you can buy an app and the next day you get a error 10000 message. Dealt with support and I got, this is a known issue and were working on it. Well they been working on it for years. I couldn't imagine how much money developers lose.