How to choose the best e-invoicing solution for webshops?

1. Are only consumers buying in your webshop?
   
   The first and most important question is: are you legally obliged to send e-invoices?
   
   If you only have consumers as customers, you have no e-invoicing obligation. If you have a purely B2B webshop, or if your customer base consists of both consumers and businesses, then you must handle e-invoicing for B2B customers.
   
   Note: Even if you are not obliged to send e-invoices yourself, as a business/company you should register on Peppol so that your suppliers can send you an e-invoice.
   
2. Do you want to send e-invoices automatically or manually?
   
   Do you want to send the e-invoice automatically via Peppol? Or is it okay to send the B2B e-invoices manually? It might sound strange to do this manually, but if you only have, say, 5 B2B customers per year, the integration effort might not be worth it.
   
3. Which webshop platform do you work on?
   
   Thirdly, it is important to understand which solution is used for the webshop. Is the online store built on Prestashop, Wix, WooCommerce, or another e-commerce platform?
   
   Every webshop platform has specific possibilities and limitations. Depending on the platform’s capabilities, only a direct or an indirect solution can be used.
   
4. Do you want to automate invoicing and follow-up?
   
   And as the last parameter: do you want to be able to automatically follow up on payments, or other actions, via your webshop? For example, do you want to send a thank-you email when an invoice has been paid on time (if payment via bank transfer is possible) by perhaps offering a discount code on the next purchase?
   

Only consumers in your webshop?

In this case, you do not need an e-invoicing solution.

Only a few B2B customers per year?

Perhaps it is not necessary to implement a solution directly in your webshop. There are several options for sending e-invoices manually, for example via your accounting/invoicing software.

Here are a few examples:

• If your accounting system also has an invoicing module, check with your accountant how to use it to send e-invoices.
• If you currently create those few invoices in Excel, consider converting them to PDF and sending them—for example—via Doccle.
• If you already use a solution like Billit, you may also be able to send those few B2B e-invoices through it.

Many B2B customers or a growing business segment?

At a certain point, manual follow-up will naturally take too much time. At that moment, you will prefer to automate your invoicing process.

And then it is most important to look at which e-commerce platform you use. Because, depending on your e-commerce solution, you can evaluate which is the best e-invoicing solution for your webshop.

What is the difference between a direct and an indirect e-invoicing solution?

A direct and automatic e-invoicing solution works within your own webshop. All your customer and invoicing data remains only in your platform. You therefore do not need to use or integrate external solutions to send e-invoices. This means you don’t need extra links, thereby avoiding possible (technical) issues.

With an indirect solution, you will need a third party. You must then take out a subscription with this third party and set up the technical integration with that platform. Besides potential extra integrations, it is also possible that certain details of your invoices are not sent through this ‘intermediary platform’. For example, it might happen that only one ‘line item’ is sent, or that a discount on one specific product is not included in the e-invoice.