What reverse charge means for intra-EU B2B supplies
Reverse charge shifts the VAT liability from the seller to the buyer. For an intra-Community supply to a business in another EU member state, you as a German merchant issue the invoice at 0 %—the recipient self-assesses the acquisition tax in their home country.
Important: this is a completely separate tax scenario. It has nothing to do with the OSS scheme, which only applies to B2C distance sales to private customers. If you serve both cases, you need a clean separation. Read how to set up OSS separately in the OSS guide.
The three conditions for the tax exemption
The 0 % treatment is tied to clear conditions. If one is missing, you owe German VAT—even if the customer is a business.
- The buyer is a business in another EU country (not Germany, not a third country).
- The buyer holds a valid VAT ID confirmed through the validation procedure.
- The goods demonstrably move physically from Germany to the other EU country (proof of arrival).
- Both VAT IDs and the reverse-charge note appear on the invoice.
Validating the VAT ID: the qualified confirmation procedure
A VAT ID alone is not enough: it must be valid at the time of supply. Via the EU VIES system (in Germany through the Federal Central Tax Office), the qualified confirmation procedure checks whether the ID, company name and address match. Document the confirmation in an audit-proof way; it is your evidence in a tax audit.
If you rely on an invalid or fake ID, the tax office can retroactively deny the exemption. In Shopify the VAT ID can be captured as an order field or customer metafield; a tool like zrapp validates it automatically and then sets the tax rate on the invoice accordingly.
Detecting and posting reverse charge in Shopify automatically
Checking every order manually against B2B-EU criteria does not scale. zrapp evaluates country, customer type and VAT ID per order and automatically decides between domestic sale (19 %/7 %), OSS and reverse charge. For a confirmed EU B2B supply, the invoice is handed over to your accounting system at 0 % with the correct mandatory note.
The handover runs via webhooks straight into sevdesk or Lexware Office. See the guides on connecting Shopify to sevdesk and connecting Shopify to Lexware Office. If you only need the finished invoice as PDF/ZUGFeRD, the automatic invoicing module helps.
Metafield writeback: invoice data back into the order
So you can always see in Shopify which order was posted as reverse charge, zrapp writes the invoice ID, number and tax status back into the order via metafield writeback. The tax scenario stays visible directly on the order, without having to search across two systems.
On top of that, matching tags are set (e.g. "reverse charge" or "country-XX"), so you can filter EU B2B sales and evaluate them cleanly for your VAT return and the recapitulative statement. This creates a complete, GoBD-compliant documentation trail.
Distinction: no reverse charge in these cases
Not every cross-border sale is reverse charge. If you sell to private customers in the EU, the OSS scheme applies with the destination country's local rate above the EU-wide threshold of €10,000. If you are a small business under §19 of the German VAT Act, you generally invoice without VAT, a different mechanism than reverse charge.
Third-country supplies too (e.g. Switzerland, with VAT rates of 8.1 % / 2.6 % / 3.8 %) do not fall under reverse charge but under export supply. Details on the small-business scheme are in the article Small business scheme §19 and Shopify.
