Help pay for adding VAT collection to our site

Hi All,

My name is Aaron Rackley. I am the founder of www.buysmallpress.com and previously published children's all ages comics under Fair Spark Books Ltd. I have developed Buy Small Press as a new alternative to sites such as Etsy aimed at the small press community and aimed at reducing the costs of setting up and running an online store.

If you are in the ecommerce business you will know that from the 1st of July, all business selling to the EU now have to obtain VAT on sales where necessary and pay them to the correct governing country. Buy Small Press comes under a Online Marketplace and as such has to by law do this on behalf of our store owners. This now being a legal requirement, we as a marketplace have to get this in place or we can get shut down at any time.

This is amazing news for Store owners as it is one less thing they have to worry about and keeps them being able to ship to the EU and a growing user base for their products.

To get this setup on our site is going to cost some development time and integration into a third party who can help us with the VAT collection and paying. There are various options available on the market at this time and they fall into two categories.

1. Upfront yearly costs ranging from £2,000 - £3,000

2. Per order fee of between £1 - £3.

When I started up Buy Small Press the aim of the site was always to make an affordable environment for creators to get instantly setup online for FREE with no recurring fees. Our site currently only takes 5% commission from each sale to cover the costs of running the site (hosting images, ebooks, pdfs etc).

This leaves us with only three options and why we are here fundraising today.

1. We start charging out store owners per sale a £1 - £3 fee which on a £3 comic is a no go in our opinion.

2. We do a yearly upfront with a 3rd party service and start charging out store owners a monthly fee (which would go against what we are trying to achieve here at Buy Small Press)

3. and the option we are trying here is that the community believe in what we are trying to do here at Buy Small Press and help us pay for the fees so we do not have to pass it onto the small creators where the difference of just £1 can result in a loss on their work.

So if you believe in what we are trying to do over at Buy Small Press and want to support us being able to continue this journey and keep the site up by setting up this, please donate what you can to the cause.