Note: If you don't ship to EU countries other than Germany, you can skip this step.

To be able to distinguish countries by EU membership, you need to edit the countries and country zones in the basic settings. Open the basic settings via the menu item Settings → Basic Settings → Shop Settings → Country Zones. Rename the default country zone Europe to Rest of the EU (Übriges Gemeinschaftsgebiet).

Then, under Settings → Basic Settings → Shop Settings → Countries, adjust the Area field so that all EU countries are assigned to Rest of the EU (Übriges Gemeinschaftsgebiet) and all other countries are assigned to World (Welt). For example, Switzerland should not be assigned to the Rest of the EU (Übriges Gemeinschaftsgebiet) country zone, but instead to the World (Welt) country zone.

In the country settings, you can define whether all orders (Tax-free) or only those with a VAT ID (Tax-free for companies) should be tax-exempt. This is especially important for generating tax-free cancellation invoices. You can find more on this here.

The EU tax rate field is only relevant when using older Shopware versions. From Shopware 5.5 onwards, the tax rate in the order line item is used instead.