@wraith808 - I haven't contacted the directly but I have read several feature requests on the PayPal developer site referring to VAT support and Paypal have responded to some of them with a "we are not currently looking at offering this" kind of answer.

@mrainey - good to hear the you ar satisfied. I am going to look into what is possible with the CSS. It just feels a bit weird that they don't default to a nice looking neutral white (ala PayPal et al) payment page, instead they have a muddy-brown-grey default background.

@tomos & Carol Haynes
I could offer a VAT invoice/receipt manually which is something I do monthly for my regular consulting business (I have a company in Sweden). But the consulting work I do requires 1-4 invoices per month to other Swedish companies so the VAT aspect is trivial I charge it and pay it to the Swedish government and they then claim it back. But for e-commerce the situation becomes more complicated - there are five scenarios that I have to handle.

1. Non-VAT registered within the EU: Private person or registered company not requesting VAT-free purchase. I am required to add the Swedish VAT to what I charge and pay it to the Swedish tax-authority.
2. EU company claiming VAT-free purchase (valid VAT-nr): I am required to verify that they have a valid VAT-registration number then I should not add VAT - but in my accounting I need to add the VAT (separately) as if I had charged it and then get the VAT debt cancelled - since I never actually got that money I don't need to pay it to the tax-authority.
3. EU company claiming VAT-free purchase (invalid VAT-nr): If the VAT-nr does not check out, then I must add Swedish VAT and pay that to the tax-authority. The foreign company can then request a refund of the VAT from the swedish tax authority.
4. Swedish company: I am required to add the Swedish VAT to what I charge even if they request a VAT-free purchase with a valid EU-VAT number
5. Non EU company or person: I should not add VAT for sales to people or companies who are outside the EU. I believe that I do not need to add then deduct VAT in my accounting but I do need to hand in a quartely statement of how much I have sold outside the EU.

Even at very small volumes staying within the tax laws using a payment provider like Paypal with no support for checking VAT numbers etc where I have to issue different receipts for the same product depending on what I can find out manually is just out of the question. Or I could create my own automated PayPal VAT checking solution but that is just too much work considering there are other providers who handle this for me and then just send me a monthly statement with info I need for my book-keeping.

I personally think a shopping cart is an unnecessary step for buying or donating to software. Once someone indicates that they want to offer you money they should be taken to the actual payment step with as few intervening pages/steps as possible. Both Paypal and FastSpring support going directly to a payment page through links, I believe that Kagi and Share-it also offer direct-to-purchase links.

Not the most ergonomic space... Mostly I have been working from my client's offices or from cafés and so haven't had a work-space at home, this setup is new. It's a corner of my 6 year old daughters room (she has moved her bed into her borthers room) the screen is one I found in the basement (must be ten years old) and the Macbook is on a notebook stand.