Selling through a marketplace: who invoices and what you record

Three ways of selling through a marketplace, three tax outcomes

It is worth separating, from the start, three different models that get lumped together under the word «marketplace». The first is selling your own products, stored and shipped by you, through the platform's storefront: here you remain the seller in every sense. The second is using the platform's own warehouse and logistics, where the product stays yours until it sells but is physically held by a third party. The third is selling as a third party seller inside a marketplace run by someone else, where your own trading name may not even appear to the buyer.

None of the three, on its own, turns the platform into the seller for VAT purposes. What decides that question is not the logistics model, nor who stores the product, but whether the transaction fits one of the two defined cases of article 8 bis of the Spanish VAT Act, explained in the next section. Confusing «the platform handles logistics» with «the platform is the seller for tax purposes» is the underlying mistake behind most marketplace invoicing questions.

So the first step, before looking at anything else, is identifying which of these three models your specific transaction fits, because the rest of this guide rests on that distinction. Many sellers use several models at once, even within the same platform: part of the catalogue in the platform's warehouse and part shipped directly by them, and that mix calls for a case by case review rather than one answer applied to the whole catalogue. How each of these models is recorded in day to day accounting, beyond the tax treatment, is covered by the online shop accounting guide.

When the platform becomes the seller: article 8 bis

Article 8 bis of the VAT Act deals, by name, with «supplies of goods facilitated through a digital interface» and states that when a business, using a digital interface such as an online marketplace, a platform, a portal or similar means, facilitates (a) the distance sale of goods imported from third countries or territories in consignments whose intrinsic value does not exceed 150 euros, or (b) the supply of goods within the EU by a business not established in the EU to someone who is not acting as a business, «in both cases the business owning the digital interface shall be deemed to have received and supplied the goods itself».

The consequence is blunt: in those two cases, and only those two, the law splits the transaction into two separate legal supplies. You supply the goods to the platform, and the platform supplies them to the final consumer, charging VAT and answering for it. In the second of those two cases the law closes the split with an express exemption: article 20 bis of the VAT Act exempts, in the case of article 8 bis(b), «supplies of goods made to the business facilitating the supply through the digital interface, where those supplies are deemed to take place in the territory where the tax applies». In plain terms: in that case your supply to the platform carries no output VAT, and the only VAT the buyer bears is the one the platform charges.

Outside those two exact cases, the platform does not become the seller merely by facilitating the sale: a seller established in Spain selling goods already inside the EU to a consumer in another European country remains the seller for every purpose, and it is that seller who must charge VAT, even if under the distance selling rules and, where relevant, the modelo 369 one stop shop.

This distinction is not an academic nuance: it decides who charges VAT to the final consumer and who the Spanish tax authorities can turn to if something goes wrong with the VAT on that specific transaction. A seller who assumes that, by selling on Amazon, the platform «takes care of VAT» in every case may find out that the duty was theirs from day one.

The 150 euro consignment and when the tax becomes chargeable

The 150 euro ceiling in article 8 bis(a) is measured on the consignment's intrinsic value, and the article itself closes with the rule that «the intrinsic value of the goods shall be determined under customs legislation»: it is not the sale price including taxes, nor the amount you see collected in the dashboard, but a customs figure. And it is a per consignment threshold, not per customer or per year: the limit is compared against the intrinsic value of each consignment, so an imported consignment whose intrinsic value exceeds 150 euros falls outside article 8 bis(a) and follows the general import rules instead. The VAT Act does not define what a consignment is, nor how its value is measured: it refers that determination to customs legislation, which is also what decides what counts as a single consignment. So, before assuming which side of the limit a sale falls on, what has to be checked is the customs documentation of the consignment as it was actually dispatched, not the order total as it appears in the platform's dashboard.

When the transaction does fall under article 8 bis, the moment the tax arises changes too. Article 75.Three of the VAT Act sets a specific chargeable event for the two supplies the law splits: for «the supply made to the business facilitating the sale or the supply, as well as the one made by that business, it shall arise upon acceptance of the customer's payment». It is not the day you ship the parcel, nor the day the platform pays you out weeks later: it is the acceptance of the buyer's payment, a date the platform itself records. If your accounting uses the payout date as the transaction date, quarter end transactions will land in the wrong period.

What does stay yours is documenting that supply to the platform properly, with its own VAT treatment, so that your accounting and your record books reflect the transaction for what it is: a supply to an intermediary the law treats as buying and reselling, not a mere intermediation fee. This treatment of imported distance sales differs from the one that applies when you invoice a foreign client directly without charging VAT on other grounds, which is covered by the guide to invoicing foreign clients without VAT.

Who issues the invoice and why the responsibility stays yours

Outside the two cases of article 8 bis, you remain the seller, and the invoice to the final consumer therefore has to go out under your name and your own numbering, even if the marketplace generates it automatically on your behalf. The platform technically producing it is perfectly possible: article 5 of the Spanish invoicing regulation (Real Decreto 1619/2012) allows the duty to issue an invoice to «be materially complied with by the recipients of the transactions or by third parties», but adds, in the same breath, the part almost nobody reads and the one that matters: «in any of these cases, the business or taxable person under the duty to issue the invoice shall be responsible for complying with all the obligations laid down in this title».

Where the party materially issuing is the recipient of the transaction, that same article 5 requires three concrete things: a prior agreement between the parties, signed before the transactions take place and specifying which ones it covers; an acceptance procedure for each invoice by the party that carried out the transaction; and a copy sent back by whoever issued it. It is worth checking which of the two arrangements your marketplace contract actually describes, because issuing by a third party does not carry those three requirements and self billing by the recipient does.

The practical consequence is the same either way: if the platform changes format, is slow generating the document or stops operating in a country, the responsibility for a correct invoice existing for every sale is still yours. It is therefore worth keeping, alongside whatever the dashboard shows, your own copy of every invoice issued in your name, with its numbering, so that you can rebuild your record book without depending on the marketplace keeping that history. Many sellers discover that dependency too late, when they need an invoice from two years ago and the dashboard no longer offers it.

The record the platform keeps for ten years

Article 166 bis of the VAT Act requires a digital interface that facilitates supplies of goods or services to people who are not acting as businesses, without being the taxable person on those supplies itself, to keep «a record of those transactions». Its content follows article 54c(2) of Regulation (EU) 282/2011, it has to be made available electronically to the member states that request it, and the article sets its lifespan: «the record shall be kept for a period of ten years from the end of the year in which the transaction took place».

This is a duty owed by the platform to the tax authorities, not a document that replaces your own record book or that you have to manage: it exists precisely because, in many cases, the platform facilitates transactions the authorities need traceability over even though the taxable person is you and not the platform. Where the platform is in fact the taxable person by falling under article 8 bis, the same article 166 bis imposes, in its second paragraph, a different set of records depending on whether it uses the special one stop shop schemes.

For you, as a seller, what matters about that ten year record is that it confirms the platform keeps its own documentation of the transactions it facilitates, but it does not release you from keeping yours: they are two parallel duties, on two different parties, each responsible for its own side, and with different periods. If the authorities ask about a specific transaction they can go to either record depending on who they address, so it is unwise to assume the platform's record fills the gap left by a badly kept book of your own.

What you record in your books, and what not to duplicate

Regardless of who invoices the final consumer, you keep your own VAT record book, and article 63.3 of the VAT Regulation is literal about its content: in the issued invoices register «invoices issued shall be recorded one by one», stating the number and, where applicable, the series, the date of issue, the date the transactions were carried out where different, the full name or company name and the tax number of the recipient, the taxable base, the rate applied and the VAT amount. When the sale falls under article 8 bis and the platform invoices the consumer, what you record in your book is the transaction as it affects you, that is, the supply to the platform, not the final sale it invoices on its own account.

When the sale does not fall under that rule and you remain the seller, every invoice to the final consumer, whether you issue it or the platform generates it in your name, is recorded one by one with all of that data. The common mistake, and the one that causes most argument in a tax review, is recording the dashboard's summary as if it were the record book, instead of the individual invoices that summary groups together. It usually goes unnoticed for years, precisely because the totals add up: the problem only surfaces when someone asks for the detail invoice by invoice and finds that level of detail was never kept outside the dashboard.

If you also sell under the Union scheme of modelo 369, those supplies are recorded separately from domestic ones. And if you sell goods to businesses in other EU countries, those supplies exempt under article 25 of the VAT Act go into modelo 349, because article 79.1.1 of the VAT Regulation says so, while expressly excluding from that return supplies made «to recipients who have not been allocated a VAT identification number» in another member state. It is not a matter of passing any figure: modelo 349 is owed because of the type of transaction and who the recipient is, not because of a threshold. And modelo 349 is not only about goods: article 79.1.4 of the same regulation puts intra-EU acquisitions of services into that return, that is, services supplied to you by a business established in the EU but outside the territory where Spanish VAT applies when you are the taxable person, which is exactly what happens with the platform fee covered in the next section.

The marketplace fee is a purchase invoice too

Whatever the selling model, the platform charges you a fee for facilitating the transaction, handling payment, storage or advertising, and that fee is a service rendered to you, with its own invoice, issued by whichever group entity applies. That fee invoice is recorded in your received invoices register. If the entity invoicing you is not established in the territory where Spanish VAT applies, you become the taxable person: article 84.One.2(a) of the VAT Act makes taxable persons of «businesses for whom the transactions subject to the tax are carried out» when those transactions «are carried out by persons or entities not established in the territory where the tax applies». That is the reverse charge, and it means the fee enters your modelo 303 on both sides, output and input, instead of reaching you with Spanish VAT on the invoice.

Treating the fee as a silent deduction buried inside the amount you finally collect, with no invoice and no entry of its own, is the same mistake made when a shop of your own fails to separate its payment gateway fee: gross sale, fee and net are three different figures, and only the first is what gets invoiced to the final customer. Beyond the selling fee, many platforms invoice storage, advertising inside their own search results or logistics services separately, and each of those deserves its own expense account so you can later analyse which service is eating which part of the margin.

The platform report is not your accounting

Any marketplace's seller dashboard offers very complete sales reports, with daily, weekly or monthly totals, breakdowns by product and even tax estimates. They are a useful tool to track the business day to day, but they neither are nor replace your issued invoices register or your accounting: they do not carry your invoice numbering, they do not always distinguish precisely between article 8 bis cases and ordinary sales, and their format can change with no notice and no guarantee of long term storage.

The right way to work is to download, as often as your filing cycle requires, the transaction detail the platform offers, and use it as a source to build your own record book and your own accounting, not as a substitute for either. The day the Spanish tax authorities ask you to justify a figure, what is required is your record book with its invoices, not a screenshot of the sales dashboard. Automating that periodic download, instead of remembering to do it by hand every quarter, is what stops you being left without that backup on the day it really matters, because the platform has already redesigned its dashboard or stopped showing older orders.

How kontora handles it

In kontora you register each sales channel and its orders come in two ways: sent to the kontora API from your shop or integration, or uploaded as a CSV file. There is no native connector to Amazon or Shopify: the channel's name is a label, not a connection, and we do not describe it any other way. Every order becomes its invoice through the Verifactu chain and is recorded in the register, and fee invoices come in as an expense through the inbox. Payouts are reconciled today against sales through the Stripe path.

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