Hello,
some time ago at Devcon (it was back in the one in Budapest) I talked with someone from Commerce team about taxes in the EU. My question was if Liferay was planning to support the EU taxation and the response was that he wasn’t aware of the issue but would look into it.
It’s been quite a while since then, so I decided to check if anything changed in that matter (as I’m going to need that soon for a new project) and I checked the latest 2026.Q1 version. It seems the issue is still there.
Are there any plans to address this? While we already have a solution (custom tax engine) as we’ve been working with Commerce for years, I believe it would be beneficial for Liferay to attract more companies to the Commerce solution.
Short recap what is missing: there are quite a few tax rules for VAT in EU (there is this article from EU Commision for example: Place of taxation - Taxation and Customs Union - European Commission ) but they are quite alike for many cases. As far as I can tell we could sum up Liferay Commerce’s tax capabilities as follows:
- B2B (with valid EU tax id): everything works (if you are not selling to B2C at the same time)
- B2C or B2B without valid EU tax id
- Domestic: everything works
- Outside of EU: everything works
- To another country in EU: cannot be configured with Liferay Commerce
The issue is that if you are a shop from one EU country and selling to another EU country you need to apply different taxes based on some conditions:
- B2B: 0%
- B2C/B2B without EU tax id: there are two options - you apply either your domestic tax OR the tax of a buyer, it depends on some further conditions and sales thresholds (see EU OSS)
I also wrote a longer article on the topic a while ago: https://innray.com/blog/eu-taxes-in-liferay where you can read more details.
I believe it would be beneficial for EU companies to have correct tax calculation out of the box, instead it is hard to convince anyone to try it instead of more popular commerce platforms.