Someone in Sydney buys your course. You charge them no New Zealand GST — but you do need to be able to show why, and eventually Australia has its own question for you. Here is where the line sits.
A digital product or service sold from New Zealand to an Australian customer is generally zero-rated for New Zealand GST — the sale goes on your return at 0%, and you need evidence the buyer is not a New Zealand resident. Australia has its own GST system with its own registration thresholds; whether you owe anything there is an Australian question that starts mattering as your Australian sales grow.
Zero-rated is not the same as ignored. Take a NZ$149 course sold to a buyer in Melbourne: the buyer pays NZ$149, no GST is added on top, and the NZ$149 still appears on your GST return — as a zero-rated supply rather than a standard-rated one. The money does not change; the classification does. The sale also still counts toward your turnover, which is worth knowing if you are near the registration threshold.
If you are not GST-registered at all, none of this applies to you yet — the register-or-not question comes first, and it is covered in when to register for GST.
Zero-rating rests on the buyer being outside New Zealand, and IRD’s expectation is evidence, not memory. For digital products and remote services, any two non-conflicting pieces will generally do: an overseas billing address, the location of the buyer’s device or IP address, or an overseas bank or card.
The checkout stores two of those on every order without being asked: the country the buyer states at checkout, and the IP address of the device that placed the order. Both appear against each order in the CSV export, so when your accountant asks why April’s Australian sales carried no GST, the answer is two columns in a spreadsheet rather than an archaeology project. The card’s issuing country lives in your payment processor’s records, which gives you a third source if you ever need one.
Two pieces that conflict are worse than one that is clear. An Australian billing address paired with a New Zealand IP is exactly the order to look at before you file, not after.
Zero-rating settles the New Zealand side. Australia runs its own GST — 10%, with a registration threshold for remote sellers of AU$75,000 of Australian sales in a twelve-month period. Below that, most New Zealand sellers of digital products owe Australia nothing. Above it, you are looking at registering with the Australian Taxation Office, which is a real obligation with real paperwork.
We are not going to give you Australian tax advice, and you should be wary of any checkout that tries. What we can give you is the shape of the question: it does not matter while your Australian sales are small, and when they grow, it matters whether or not you noticed. The CSV export gives you the number to watch — filter orders by country, sum the trailing twelve months. When that figure starts moving toward the threshold, that is a conversation with your accountant, not a setting in your checkout.
On gocushy, selling outside New Zealand is off until you turn it on. That is deliberate. The moment an Australian buyer can pay you, you have taken on the evidence question above and, eventually, the threshold question — and we would rather you take those on because you decided to, not because a checkout defaulted you into them on day one.
It is also worth being plain about what the checkout does and does not do here. It classifies the sale, stores the evidence, and puts both in the export. It does not file your GST return, and it does not watch the Australian threshold for you — that is your accountant’s job, made easier by records that already say who bought from where.
If you want a checkout that treats an Australian sale as the different thing it is — zero-rated, with the proof kept — you can try it on your own products first.
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