The course itself and the machinery that sells it are two separate purchases, and most guides on this subject were written for Americans or Australians, so the tax half is wrong for New Zealand. Here is the whole path, with the numbers.
You can sell an online course from New Zealand with your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account and a checkout that charges 15% GST to New Zealand buyers, zero-rates overseas buyers, and issues a tax invoice in your name. GST registration becomes compulsory once your turnover passes NZ$60,000 in any rolling 12 months.
That sentence contains the two decisions that matter, and they are separate decisions. Where the course lives — the videos, the lessons, the workbook downloads — is a hosting choice. How the money is taken, taxed and recorded is a checkout choice. Plenty of people conflate the two, choose a course platform for its video player, and inherit whatever that platform does about New Zealand GST, which for most overseas platforms is nothing useful.
No, and it is usually better if it does not. gocushy is the checkout, not a course host: it takes the payment into your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account, works out the GST, issues the invoice, and then hands the buyer on to wherever the course actually lives through a delivery link — a members area, a video host, a community platform, a folder of files. The checkout does not care which, and you can change hosts later without touching how you get paid.
On the way through, the checkout adds the selling machinery a bare payment link does not have: an order bump on the payment page, a one-click upsell after it, an affiliate programme that belongs to you rather than to a marketplace, sequentially numbered tax invoices, and an entry in Xero for each order. The one rule worth knowing in advance is the delivery gate: an offer with no delivery link, access note or webhook is refused at the point of going live, because a buyer who paid and received nothing is treated as the worst possible outcome rather than as a support ticket.
Take a course priced at NZ$497, GST-inclusive. A buyer in Hamilton pays NZ$497.00, and the tax invoice reads NZ$432.17 for the course plus NZ$64.83 GST — the same NZ$497.00, split the way IRD expects to see it. The same course sold to a buyer in Sydney is zero-rated: they also pay NZ$497.00, and the invoice shows GST of $0.00, because a digital product supplied to someone outside New Zealand is treated as an export.
| Buyer | Course | GST | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Zealand | NZ$432.17 | NZ$64.83 | NZ$497.00 |
| Australia (zero-rated) | NZ$497.00 | $0.00 | NZ$497.00 |
Zero-rating is only defensible if you can show the buyer genuinely was overseas, so the checkout stores the two pieces of residency evidence IRD wants to see together: the country the buyer stated at checkout, and the country of the device’s IP address. You do not have to remember to collect either one; they are on the order when you need them.
One line worth pinning up, because most course-selling guides are written for the wrong country: New Zealand’s registration threshold is NZ$60,000 and GST is 15%, while Australia’s is AU$75,000 at 10% — a guide that mixes those up is describing the wrong country.
Then you are not required to register for GST, you do not charge it, and nothing above breaks — the same checkout simply sells the course at NZ$497 with no tax line, because only a GST-registered seller charges GST or issues documents calling themselves tax invoices. The threshold is turnover over any rolling 12 months, not a calendar year, so a strong launch in March counts against the twelve months that follow it, and it is worth watching before it is compulsory rather than after.
When you do cross it, you register with IRD and the same checkout starts adding 15% for New Zealand buyers from that point on. Whether your price stays at NZ$497 with GST inside it, or moves, is a pricing decision rather than a plumbing one — the zero-rating of overseas buyers, the invoice numbering and the Xero entries carry on unchanged.
Connect your own Stripe account, create the offer, paste the delivery link to wherever your course lives, and make one test purchase — then read the invoice and the Xero entry that come out the other end. The trial exists so you can run that entire loop on your own course before a real buyer does.
Start your 30-day trialTell us what's happening and we'll email you back. A real person reads every message.
We'll reply to . If it's urgent you can also email support@gocushy.com.