VAT Ireland - Europe HELP PLEASE!

Hi, I've only had my Zen Cart for just over a week, but I've run into some problems with the "Taxes". Checked the relevant posts but couldn't find what I was looking for. I bought the Zen Cart book btw and find it very good, but the chapter on Taxes is a complete mystery to me.
All I wanted to do was to include the VAT in the price of my products where applicable (I'll be selling natural healthcare/herbal products and some of my products would be exempt from VAT).
The Irish VAT went up to 21.5% in yesterday's budget and is higher than that of other European countries.
How do I go about setting the taxes/VAT?
Can I just include the VAT of 21.5% in my products where applicable? I should not be liable for taxes in other countries, should I?
Can someone PLEASE talk me through this or send me a link of an easy guide of how to do this? This is my first cart/website and I'm not a computer geek, didn't even grow up with computers, so please go easy on me:cool:
Many thanks!

The easiest solution for now is to include VAT in your prices (when they are required to be "vattable".

So, if you have a product whose excl price is EUR10.00, then you would show it in your shop as EUR12.50

If you have a product that is exempt from VAT and cost EUR10.00, then you just display it as EUR10.00

You do your accounting outside of the webshop anyway, so vat returns are a different and separate exercise.

I'm not sure about this (please check with your local tax office) but I think that if you are based in Ireland and sell to the EU, you need to apply a "blanket" vat of 15% to every other EU country...

... and this is where things can start to get cumbersome!

If you intend to do a lot of selling outside Ireland, then you are going to have to re-visit your tax settings in the shop.

Zencart accommodates these complex tax possibilities by a very clever internal mechanism of variables, that cross reference a buyer's geographical location to the appropriate rate of tax.

It takes a bit of time to set it up, but principally it involves configuring ZONE DEFINITIONS. This is where you set up a zone definition that houses the affected countries in a given tax regime.

For example: If you are selling to Ireland and the EU, you will need TWO Zone Definitions. One for Ireland @ 21.5%, and one for the rest of the EU @ 15%.

So you set up your tax classes and "associate" the zone definitions to them.

Now, when you apply your tax in this way, you need to put your prices into zencart EXCLUSIVE of VAT, and make the tax class "Taxable Goods" for products that are subject to VAT, and --none-- for products that are vat free.

The difficulty (and no solution yet) is when a product may be vat free in Ireland - but not in France!

The book is very good at helping you here. You just need to work through it.

Thanks very much for your useful information. Much appreciated!
Reckon I'll have to go through it again and maybe it'll get easier. If not, I may have to ask you :blush:again on this thread.