VAT invoice on Shopify: what the order confirmation is missing

What Shopify does by default

The order confirmation email looks like a receipt, and plenty of merchants treat it as their invoice. It usually isn't a VAT-compliant one: Shopify captures the order total and the tax collected, not a structured VAT breakdown, and it doesn't ask for the buyer's VAT number at checkout. One merchant ended up paying for a second, unrelated app just to get one legally required field — the VAT ID — onto an invoice at all.

What to check

A proper VAT invoice generally needs the seller's own VAT or company number, the VAT rate broken out per line rather than just the total, and the buyer's VAT number for B2B sales. Look at your actual invoice on a real recent order: does it carry all three? A merchant running EU B2B sales found they couldn't pull VAT numbers directly from the order at all, and called the result "a high failure rate that is only discovered after the fact" — after the document had already gone out incomplete, not before.

What goes wrong at month end

A VAT return or an intra-EU reverse-charge check needs those numbers to reconcile. A missing VAT ID or a rate that was never broken out is the kind of gap that surfaces only when someone downstream — an accountant, a tax authority — goes looking for it across a batch of orders, not one at a time.

Check your last month, free

Plain checks a month of paid orders against every invoice, receipt and credit note that actually went out, and names the gaps. One page a month: every order, every document, every gap.

Plain is a technical aide, not legal or tax advice; your accountant or tax authority decides.