EU-based businesses are required to obtain valid VAT numbers from VAT-registered entities. Unfortunately, especially for e-commerce systems, there isn't a simple way to check the validity of a European VAT number. The European Commission provides a web site where you can validate VAT numbers by entering them in an HTML form. This is not [...]

For businesses based in the EU, it's important for VAT purposes to know whether your customers are also based in the EU. As usual, a quick Google search did not reveal a usable list of EU countries by ISO 3166 Alpha-2 code, so I whipped up my own. european_union_countries = ('AT', 'BE', 'BG', 'CY', 'CZ', [...]