Do I need to register for tax in countries I ship to?
Shipping to a country is not the test, but it is often how sellers get close to one without noticing. What registers you in a foreign market is usually the value of what you sell into it or the fact that goods are stored there, and neither requires a presence you would recognise as a presence. Each country sets its own measure and its own trigger date, so crossing one country's test tells you nothing about the next. The practical exercise is to map the markets you actually sell into, check each against its own rule, and know which ones you are close to.
My marketplace collects the tax, do I still have to file?
Almost always, yes. Marketplace collection regimes make the platform account for tax on the sales it facilitates, in the jurisdictions that impose that requirement. They do not cover every jurisdiction, every product or every channel, and they do not cover sales you make through your own storefront or through another platform. Whatever is left is yours. Being registered for the residue does not stop the marketplace collecting on its part, so the filing has to show tax accounted for by someone else as exactly that, rather than omitting it. Reconciling the platform's reports to your own return is the real work, and it recurs every period.
I sell into many countries and have registered in none, what now?
Take it market by market, worst first, and do not try to fix everything at once. For each place you sell, the questions are the same. What is the local trigger, when did you cross it, has the marketplace already been collecting on part of it, and what is the exposure for the period since. Some markets turn out to be nowhere near their test. Some have been covered by the platform all along. The ones left over are where registration, and usually a disclosure of the earlier period, has to happen. Working them in order of exposure keeps the cost proportionate to the risk.
Which country taxes my profit if my customers are all abroad?
Profit is taxed where the business is resident, and then additionally in any country where it has enough presence to be taxed there on a local basis. Selling to customers in a country is not by itself that presence. Having people, premises or stock there is a different matter, and it is a question that has to be tested country by country rather than answered in general. Treaties exist to stop the same profit being taxed twice, but they help only where they apply and where the paperwork supports the claim. In practice the income-tax question is settled long after the registration questions, and it is worth keeping the two apart in your own head.
Do I have to charge tax to customers in another country?
If you are registered in a market, yes, from the date the obligation starts. That is the part sellers consistently underestimate. The tax is meant to be collected from the customer, added to the price, at the time of sale. If you were not registered when you should have been, you cannot go back and collect it from past customers, so it comes out of margin already earned and already spent. Nothing in the rule is retrospective in the seller's favour. This is why the exercise is worth doing before a threshold is crossed rather than after it, and why knowing where you are close matters.
What happens if I should have registered in a market years ago?
Then the tax for that period is a cost you have already absorbed, and the task is to limit what sits on top of it. Most systems have a route for a seller who comes forward: registration back-dated to the correct date, the historic periods reported, and the charge settled. The terms are generally better than they are for a seller found by an audit or reported to the authority by a platform. What makes it manageable is taking each market separately and in order, because they are separate obligations owed to separate authorities, and there is no single filing that clears them all at once.
What is a "dual-status alien spouse", and why is my software asking?
The question comes from the filing-status screens, and it is asking whether your spouse was a non-resident or part-year resident for the year — because if they were, a joint return is not available by default. An election exists to treat a non-resident spouse as a resident for the whole year, which unlocks joint filing at the price of bringing their worldwide income into the US return and their accounts into its reporting. See a US person with a non-resident spouse.
What happens if I have not filed for several years?
Missed years are handled as one package, not one at a time, because the route chosen for the first year determines the relief available for the rest. Each country has a disclosure or relief programme with its own conditions, and entering the right one — before the authority contacts you — is usually what keeps penalties down. Filing quietly outside a programme forfeits that protection. See catching up on missed returns.
