I don’t understand what you mean. I can only create buttons with tax included on their price or not.
There’s no choice to list the countries that have tax or not for regular buttons, only for pro forms.
PayPal’s own code does not do that for recurring payments either, only for one time purchases.
PayPal isn’t responsible for taxes. Anyhow PayPal cannot be used for legally binding invoices. If your tax department or accountant sees the PayPal payment notice you could also just drop it . On PayPal you just send a notice not mentioning taxes then you use a proper tool or service to write the invoice
I don’t have a tax department or anything like that. Just a one person here trying to get some on line support via subscriptions.
I don’t need all that. I just need to charge 21% from EU residents and 0% for non EU Residents. Stripe does it for me. PayPal doesn’t. Pro forms for PayPal would do it if they were working, everything seems fine up to the moment you finish your subscription, then you’re sent back to the site without a subscription starting because something is broken. I also don’t see a page to upgrade to PayPal Payments Pro and the link from s2Member plugin that should take me there gives me a page that does not exist anymore.
Then I keep a record of everything and I send the taxes to the Dutch government every quarter.
The only way I was successfully able to use PayPal was to charge tax from anybody then check each subscriber individually to see if they have a billing address and if that billing address is outside the EU.
Then I refund the tax manually and edit their subscription. But it’s a pain and it’s not neat either. And it surely scares people away as well.
That’s again plain wrong. Yeah little Chance some other country goes after you but if you’re not required to write proper invoices or payment notices (that PayPal email is neither!!! If your trying as a b2b customer to deduct a PayPal payment notice that’s simply impossible. However it could serve as proof together with your PayPal log to write an invoice yourself for the other party.
So don’t mention taxes at all and then use the PayPal files inside an excel sheet to calculate all taxes due. Get help from an accountant because all what you’re doing taxes wise is rubbish, sorry to be so direct. I guess in Holland below 400 euro a simplified invoice is sufficient or just drop it completely. You’re not required under a certain turnover threshold to write simplified at all. Above 400 euro for a single sale full invoice is mandatory. And if your worldwide turnover is over 30.000 euros you have to use Moss in European Union! So it’s not 21% but the rate based on your customers location. Above 100.000 you need two pieces of proof instead of one.
Oh no, I am way below those limits. I could even go VAT free but I want the VAT kick back from business expenses. I usually have negative VAT. I am also not paying an accountant, can’t afford that either. And no b2b either.
Hi Stephen, appreciate your advice. I have a paid s2Member pro account with PayPal as the payment portal. I did try turning off the encryption option as a post by Christian suggested, but that did not help either. Have recreated the button several times with different payment terms. All failed and give that generic screen I mentioned, with no subscription option showing. I am at wits end as this is costing us sales. And abandoned carts.
. Thanks a lot for trying to help. Regards, Roger.Update: I did look at PayPal Pro option to see if that fixed the issue but it is not available in NZ. So, I cannot change anything on the PayPal side. Really reliant on @clavaque fixing the problem. Christian, can you please give an update on this one? How long do you expect to take to fix it? I prefer to stick with PayPal and not add Stripe at this time. Latter is not widely used in NZ. So Christian, is it fixable or not? If yes, how long? So we can all plan appropriately. Regards, Roger
Another Update: Apologies! Turning off encryption does permit the transaction to flow through. I had not ticked ‘Save Changes’ when I turned off yesterday. I did just now, and all seems OK - except unencrypted cannot continue too long!
However!!
The user registration fails (like Sid B Mentioned above).
The only solution is for @clavaque to update the PayPal integration, or he needs to hire someone to do it if he doesn’t know how.
There is no other solution. Either the PayPal integration is updated or s2Member is no longer PayPal compatible.
Thank you Stephen @Cralamarre
Can I ask, has anyone else in this thread migrated to another membership/subcription manager from s2Member? I need to look at options if this cannot be fixed quickly. As it is over a month since the problem was first reported, it certainly appears it cannot be fixed, at least in a reasonable time frame.,
@Roger The problem with asking if anyone has migrated to a different plugin is that the people who have migrated are not here anymore. They’ve moved on.
I wish I had enough knowledge to fix it myself but I don’t know enough php even to fix small things, let alone rewrite our PayPal routines.
It’s annoying that even PayPal’s own subscription routines won’t calculate tax based on the customer’s address, for us, for subscriptions, only for single time purchases (bonkers).
If we could at least have that working we’d be able to use PayPal buttons then add our subscribers manually (like I do frequently with late payments etc) via Wordpress’ user admin panel.
I am seriously considering charging VAT from anybody and refunding it manually like I did a little while ago, if the user’s information on PayPal makes it clear they’re not EU costumers.
We have migrated 3 of 103 site we own running s2 to Simple Membership.
It does just about everything we needed that s2 does AND uses the ‘new’ API. Not the (mostly) deprecated IPN/SOAP s2 uses.
The Paypal buttons work fine on Simple Membership.
We have had issues on ALL our sites with the s2 PayPal buttons, with registration (because the return POST variables are empty).etc.
Simple do use a separate database for users/members, (s2 uses the WordPress tables and just add a bunch of meta stuff)
but Simple has a plugin to transfer WP users to Simple.
They have an API for custom stuff.
We are going to continue testing Simple and if s2 is not fixed soon, start migrating all our s2 to Simple. May even create a PDF on how to do it. 
Over a month to get a fix is just not reasonable.
My CTO also informed me that out on the net the word is PayPal will soon REQUIRE encrypted buttons - encryption and the using the old API are the major problem. If they do that, a LOT of sites are going to crash
Sid
I need to test it again but I don’t think plain simple buttons (encrypted) fail on PayPal. I was using them before and never had issues.
My problem is with pro forms, so I can have VAT calculated. Everything seems to be working fine until you finish your “purchase” and you’re sent back to your site without being charged or a subscription starting or even an error message of any kind or log record showing what went wrong on either PayPal or s2Member’s end.
Actually they do - that is why this thread is here. a LOT of people have had their encrypted simple buttons fail. Yours must not be encrypted.
But the issue also affects other areas, such as the POST values in the return URL not being accessible. I have no idea if it also affects your VAT issue.
But since PayPal changed the encryption method, a LOT of screwy things have been noticed.
Sid
I need to test them because they were working before.
I run a micro operation in comparison with anybody else here, so I can’t precise a date but I know the last successful subscription via button happened on April 6th, 2023.
I think I removed all PayPal buttons shortly after that because of the tax situation, as I felt it was making potential subscribers unhappy with the 21% VAT even if they weren’t from the EU and almost nobody was choosing PayPal because of it.
I think I even tested it more recently with success (no pro form, no tax calculation depending on location etc), but it will be easier for me to do a new test later this week as I might bring the buttons back even with taxes, anyways, and refund whoever uses them manually.
My PayPal is European, though. Not sure it works the same way as an American one.
Sorry for the confusion. 
Ah, yes! I got one bit of feedback, but you are quite right!
That said, I have been happy with s2Member for years, so it is disappointing it has come to this.
Thank you Sid. I appreciate your very helpful reply.
Hi again Sid. Can I ask, were there any issues exporting from s2Member to Simple Member? I assume you exported to a CSV file, then deleted s2Member, installed Simple Member, then imported the users into it? No pitfalls to avoid? Thank you for your help and patience!! Once I get set up and test Simple Member, I wil share the results to this forum too.
Looks like Simple Member doesn’t have user custom fields 
