Applicable products: Netmarkets

Amazon VCS

How to access it? "Apps" > Select "Amazon VCS"

What is Amazon VCS?

Amazon offers a VAT management service called VCS (VAT Calculation Service), which can be activated from your Amazon seller account.
This service is only available for certain European countries: FR, DE, IT, ES, UK, NL, BE, IE.

Amazon offers two options:

  • You issue your own invoices following Amazon's rules (self-invoicing option).
  • OR Amazon issues your invoices for you (Amazon invoicing option).

If you are using the self-invoicing option, the Lengow app for Amazon VCS allows you to retrieve via API certain invoicing information (the VAT in particular) made available by Amazon for each order, and, once issued, to provide Amazon with your own invoice (or credit note) for the end customer.

Lengow helps you at every step and shows you the process to return your document to Amazon within the deadlines requested by the marketplace.  

Note that e-commerce CMS can NOT natively manage the settings required to perform the VCS actions. Therefore, this VCS program is not implemented on our modules Prestashop, Magento, Shopify, Shopware, Woocommerce, etc.

Amazon communication - January 2021 - Self invoicing

To meet a need of its Amazon Business customers who need to receive their invoices (or receipts) as soon as possible, Amazon introduced in July 2020 the Invoice Default Rate 
(IDR - Invoice Defect Rate rate which corresponds to all orders from Amazon Business customers for whom an invoice was not uploaded, within one business day of shipment, as a percentage of total Amazon Business customer orders).
  • From April 5, 2021, all professional sellers will be required to meet this 5% target to sell on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it and Amazon.es. Failure to meet this upcoming performance requirement may result in account deactivation. 
Please note that invoices sent via Buyer / Seller messaging do not comply with Amazon Business invoicing policy, and will therefore be considered missing and will negatively affect your invoice default rate.

How does it work?

Pre-requisites

To use Amazon VCS, make sure: 

  • To have a Professional Seller Account on Amazon 
    If you have an individual seller account, you need to upgrade it to a professional seller account. 
  • To register for the VAT calculation service in Amazon Seller Central, selecting the option to upload your invoices yourself.
Amazon VCS only supports products that are sent from the EU to the EU to generate a VAT invoice. 
However, for orders shipped directly to the EU from a country outside of the EU, Amazon VCS issues a receipt (i.e. "proof of purchase", not a VAT invoice) on which the VAT calculation does not appear.
 

Step 1: Activate Amazon VCS on Amazon

✅Follow these steps in your Amazon BO to activate the VCS service on your account: 

  1. Enter any VAT / GST registration numbers you have.

  2. Enter a default shipping address.

  3. Enter a default Product Tax Code. Ex : A_GEN_STANDARD is the code for "always taxable at the standard rate".
    These codes can be completed directly from your Lengow channels for more detailed attribution on your products. To do so: use the "Product Tax Code" attribute.

  4. Select the type of invoicing: Self Invoicing

  5. Enter the invoice activation date
    Choose the date from which you will have to download invoices for each shipment (often the same activation date as for VCS).

Special case: Amazon Invoicing

If you have chosen the type of invoicing "Amazon Invoicing" (meaning that it is Amazon which will manage the edition of your invoices), check the points below: 

  • Lengow's Orders API: "IsAmazonInvoiced" (or is-amazon-invoiced) parameter. If the value is "true", it indicates that you have enabled the Amazon Invoicing option of VCS.
  • Complete the "Product Tax Code" attribute in each of your Amazon channels in Lengow if you wish to modify for some products or all of your products the default value already defined in your Amazon back-office when choosing "Amazon Invoicing" (some values are mandatory, e.g. "A_GEN_TAX" values).
  • All prices sent to Amazon must remain "VAT included" even if you use the VCS service.

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Step 2: Activate the VCS App in Lengow

 Follow these steps to use Amazon VCS on Lengow: 

    1. In Lengow, go to the "Apps" tab and select "Amazon VCS":

      VCS connect1.png

    2. Activate the app by clicking on "Connect Amazon VCS":

      VCS connect2.png

Step 3: Manage Amazon VCS with Lengow

Once an order is in shipped status, the billing/credit note information is immediately available through our API so you can use it for your invoices/credit notes. 

 Here is the Lengow workflow: 

1/ Retrieving invoice information (Lengow API)

Having chosen the "self invoicing" invoicing option, you must first retrieve the invoicing data via our API. 
This data is part of a report called VIDR (VAT Invoice Data Report) by Amazon and will be useful for you to create your invoice (or credit note in case of a refund).

From the Lengow platform, in the orders tab, you can find in each order an icon indicating the status of the billing information that Amazon sends us back (for invoice or credit note to be edited).

When invoice information is available for upload the status is: 
  • Invoice Pending / Credit Note Pending

Consult our API documentation to see how to retrieve it.

Amazon recommends that merchants schedule VIDR retrieval at least twice a day so that invoices can be uploaded within a maximum of 12 hours after the order has been shipped.

Lengow does not generate an invoice directly for Amazon. You must retrieve the VIDR report which contains the data allowing you to edit your invoice. Consult our API doc, or Amazon documentation

2/ Editing your invoice (to do on the merchant's side) 

Once you have retrieved this billing information, you can create your invoice and customize it.

For information, here is the list of mandatory information for Amazon (list here):

  1. Registered company name and address of the seller

  2. VAT identification number of the seller (if applicable)

  3. Complete official name and address of the customer

  4. VAT identification number of the customer. Only necessary if the customer is responsible for the taxation of the purchase order (e.g., for intra-Community delivery, reverse charge procedure). Customer VAT Number is provided in VIDR.

  5. Invoice date/service date

  6. Invoice number

  7. Order date

  8. Product name

  9. Purchase quantity

  10. Unit price of the item (without VAT)

  11. VAT rate applied

  12. Discounts/promotions, if not included in the unit price

  13. VAT amount

  14. Justification/references if the customer is responsible for the payment of VAT. Citation is a legal text required on an invoice when Customer owes VAT, in other words, when VAT charged by the Seller is zero percent. This can happen in cases such as Domestic Reverse Charge, export out of EU, or intra-community supply of goods

3/ Upload your invoice in Lengow API

Once you have created your invoice / credit voucher, you can upload it to our API directly via a POST (see our API documentation)

Then it is sent to Amazon. Amazon then returns a status. You can follow the status of your invoice from the Lengow platform or via our API.
Possible statuses:
  • Invoice Processing: Amazon processes the invoice. 

  • Invoice_Uploaded: Amazon has received and posted the invoice. When you see this status, the end customer then has the possibility of downloading the invoice from his Amazon customer account. 

  • Invoice_Rejected: Amazon received the invoice, but there are errors (ex: "Multiple shipments": the order ID has multiple shipments. Please indicate the shipment ID).

Your uploaded invoice is available in Lengow on the order's page.

Amazon Documentation

Sellers must upload their invoice in PDF format for all orders within 24 hours after shipping. If the invoices are not uploaded within 24 hours, Amazon may suspend the seller's access to VCS.  
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