Re: Amazon is a seller of physical goods...
As I understand the plan is already in place to expand the new rules to all goods and services sold online - digital or physical, bespoke or prepared - as soon as 2016.
Basically, if you run a business that sells anything over the internet, this is going to affect you. If you're selling direct, it'll all but force you to do your business through a corporate platform that will handle VAT instead, and if you're already using those it'll make your income less predictable as the VAT share of the sale price will suddenly vary depending on where the sales come from. Not to mention that many of the big platforms (Etsy, Steam and Bandcamp spring to mind) haven't commented on whether they will handle this for sellers, and some have already said they won't (iBooks).
This is going to bite small bands selling mp3s, comic artists selling ebooks and those kinds of people *big* time. Freelancers and independent artists don't usually have trade orgs or any other kind of organised representation, so "missing" them in these considerations and the discussions HMRC say they've been having with SMEs is an easy oversight, but the impact on them is huge.
Basically, a business that doesn't make enough to afford an accountant and sacrificing margin to third-party sales platforms to do the work for them is going to be all but shut out entirely from the digital single market that Andrus Ansip praised so highly in his blog post. Good work all round.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
