Someone here must've been through this before.

I am setting an online shop to sell virtual goods (software). From what I've been told by our accounting firm, we must collect names and physical addresses of all customers in order to be able NOT to pay VAT for non-Swiss customers. This is clearly unacceptable.

When I tried explaining that we can capture the network address of each customer and reliably restore their country of origin from it, it seemed to have fell on deaf ears.

So right now I am looking at the choice between losing a bunch of sales to the obnoxiously intrusive order form -or- paying VAT on all sales.

Is there a third option?