Collect Customer Tax IDs with Checkout
Displaying a customer’s tax ID and legal business name on invoices is a common requirement that you can satisfy by enabling tax ID collection in Checkout. You can enable tax ID collection on all payment and subscription mode Sessions (tax ID collection isn’t supported in setup mode). This guide assumes that you’ve already integrated Checkout. If you haven’t, see the guide.
Supported Tax ID types
Checkout collects the following tax ID types in the given regions:
| Country | Supported Tax ID types |
|---|---|
European Union | eu_vat, ch_vat, gb_vat, no_vat |
Norway | eu_vat, ch_vat, gb_vat, no_vat |
Switzerland | eu_vat, ch_vat, gb_vat, no_vat |
United Kingdom | eu_vat, ch_vat, gb_vat, no_vat |
Australia | au_abn |
New Zealand | nz_gst |
Mexico | mx_rfc |
South Africa | za_vat |
Singapore | sg_gst |
Enable Tax ID collection
With tax ID collection enabled, Checkout shows and hides the tax ID collection form depending on your customer’s location. If your customer is in a location supported by tax ID collection, Checkout shows a checkbox allowing the customer to indicate that they’re purchasing as a business. When a customer checks the box, Checkout displays fields for them to enter their business’s tax ID and their business’s legal entity name. If available, Checkout uses the customer’s shipping address to determine their location, otherwise Checkout uses the customer’s billing address.
New Customers
If you don’t pass an existing customer when creating a Session, Checkout creates a new Customer for you. When you enable tax ID collection, Checkout saves any tax ID information collected during a Session to that new Customer.
To enable tax ID collection for new customers, set tax_id_collection[enabled] to true when creating a Checkout session.
The above code example creates a Session in payment mode with tax ID collection enabled. To enable tax ID collection in subscription mode you would make the same changes highlighted in green to your subscription mode Session creation request.
Existing Customers
If you pass an existing Customer when creating a Session, Checkout updates the Customer with any tax ID information collected during the Session. Checkout saves the collected business name onto the Customer’s name property, and adds the collected tax ID to the Customer’s customer.tax_ids array. Since the collection of a business name could result in the Customer’s existing name being overridden, you must set customer_update[name] to auto when creating the Session.
Checkout only collects tax IDs on Customer’s that don’t already have an existing tax ID. If a Customer has one or more tax IDs saved, Checkout does not display the tax ID collection form even if tax ID collection is enabled.
When collecting tax IDs for existing customers you can choose to either base their location on existing addresses on the customer or the addresses entered during checkout. By default, Checkout looks for existing addresses on the customer to assess their location:
If you don’t have the addresses of your existing customers saved, you can choose to base their location on the billing or shipping address entered during Checkout. To specify that you want to use the billing address entered during Checkout to assess the customer’s location, you must set customer_update[address] to auto.
When setting customer_update[address] to auto Checkout replaces any previously saved addresses on the customer with the address entered during the session.
If you’re collecting shipping addresses for existing customers, you must base their location on the shipping address entered during checkout. To do so, set customer_update[shipping] to auto.
When setting customer_update[shipping] to auto Checkout replaces any previously saved shipping addresses on the customer with the shipping address entered during the session.
The above code examples create Sessions in payment mode with tax ID collection enabled. To enable tax ID collection in subscription mode you would make the same changes highlighted in green to your subscription mode Session creation request.
Retrieving Customer Tax ID details after a Session
Checkout saves collected tax IDs and business names to the Customer object associated with the Session. A tax ID collected during checkout is accessible under the Customer’s customer.tax_ids array. You can also retrieve all tax IDs saved to a Customer with the Customer Tax IDs resource. Every new tax ID includes an associated legal business name, which Checkout saves to the Customer’s name property. In doing so, the collected legal business name is always visible on any subscription invoices for that Customer.
Checkout also includes provided tax IDs on the resulting Session object. After each completed Session, Checkout emits a checkout.session.completed event that you can listen for in a webhook endpoint. If you wish to retrieve the collected tax ID from the Session object, it’s available under the Session’s customer_details.tax_ids array:
{ "object": { "id": "cs_test_a1dJwt0TCJTBsDkbK7RcoyJ91vJxe2Y", "object": "checkout.session", ... "customer": "cus_id_of_new_customer", "customer_details": { ... "tax_ids": [ {
Testing your integration
In test mode you can enter any alphanumeric string that is in the correct format of a supported tax ID type (E.g., DE123456789 for eu_vat). For a full list of example tax IDs you can reference our Customer Tax ID guide. You can also use our test tax IDs to test various verification state flows: test business tax IDs.
Validation
Checkout performs checks during the Session to ensure that provided tax IDs are formatted correctly. We don’t verify that provided tax IDs are valid during the Session. You’re responsible for ensuring the validity of customer information collected during Checkout. To help, Stripe performs automatic validation against government databases for Australian Business (ABN) numbers, European Value-Added-Tax (EU VAT) numbers, and United Kingdom Value-Added-Tax (GB VAT) numbers. You can read more on the validation we perform, and how to consume the status of those checks in our Customer Tax ID guide.