Does Your Belgian Online Shop Have to Send E-Invoices?

If your Belgian shop sells to other businesses, it has to send them structured e-invoices, and it has had to since 1 January 2026. E-invoicing is mandatory between businesses in Belgium, a PDF by email does not satisfy the rule, and the format is Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 delivered over the Peppol network. Sales to private customers are outside that obligation entirely — no e-invoice is raised, and your checkout does not change for them. So the practical question is not whether the mandate reached e-commerce. It is what your checkout asks a business buyer, what happens when that buyer cannot be reached, and what a refund becomes.

This page is for the owner or store manager of an online shop registered in Belgium that sells at least partly to businesses. It stays on Belgium and on the shop's own flow; the wider mandate, the penalties and the identifier rules each have their own page and are linked where they belong.

Does the Belgian rule apply to my online shop?

If you invoice other businesses, yes.

Belgium's business-to-business e-invoicing obligation has been in force since 1 January 2026. It is about the relationship between the two parties, not about the sales channel: an invoice to a business is an invoice to a business whether it came from an account manager or from a Shopping Basket page. There is no e-commerce carve-out, and there is no threshold that lets a small shop out on volume. What changed in Belgium on 1 January 2026 sets out the general scope, the exemptions and the transitional easing for the smallest enterprises.

Two things narrow it usefully.

Consumer sales are not in it. The 2026 obligation covers business-to-business supplies. A sale to a private customer produces no e-invoice, and nothing about that order changes. For most online shops this is the majority of orders, which is why the right design shows the new checkout field to business buyers only.

Establishment decides, not registration. A foreign company with a Belgian fixed establishment is inside the obligation; a non-resident without one is not, although it will still be sent structured invoices by its Belgian suppliers and needs to be able to receive them. That inbound half is a separate job from anything on this page, and receiving your suppliers' e-invoices in Belgium covers it: being reachable on the network is not the same as being able to read what arrives. When the Belgian mandate reaches a foreign company works through that test properly, and it is the first thing to settle if your shop is run from outside Belgium.

What has to change at checkout?

One field, and it should only ever be shown to a business buyer.

A structured invoice has to be addressed to somebody. In Belgium that address is the enterprise number under Peppol identifier scheme 0208 — not the VAT number, and not a free-text company name. Registering a Belgian participant under the VAT-number scheme instead is a breach of the Belgian rule rather than a stylistic choice, and why scheme 0208 is not optional covers the check digit and what goes wrong at lookup when it is ignored.

So the checkout needs to collect that number from business buyers and validate it before the order is paid, because an invalid number discovered at invoicing time is a compliance problem you find out about after the customer has left. On both of our storefront apps this is one optional field that follows the language of your site, shown to business buyers and hidden from consumers: on WooCommerce in Belgium it is a single field on the checkout, and the Wix app puts the same field in place from one button in Settings and checks the number as it is entered.

The rest of the change is invisible to the buyer. Your theme, your payment provider and your order flow stay as they are. What changes is what happens after payment completes.

What happens when the business buyer is already on Peppol?

The invoice is delivered into their accounting software, and you get an answer back.

This is the case the rule was designed around and the one most of your business orders will fall into. The paid order becomes a structured invoice in Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, it is validated before anything leaves, it travels over the Peppol network to the buyer's own service provider, and their acknowledgement lands back on the order in your shop.

The part worth understanding is who does what. Your shop raises the sale. An access point turns it into the structured document and delivers it. GoRoute is itself the certified Peppol access point — POP000991 — so issuing, delivery and the delivery answer are one service with one place to look when a document does not land, rather than an invoice generator bolted onto somebody else's network. That matters less on a good day than on the day a document goes missing.

What you should see, on the order, without opening a second system: the invoice number, the channel it went by, and whether it was delivered.

What happens when the business buyer is not on Peppol?

You are told so, on the order — and emailing a PDF instead is not the fix.

Until the end of 2025, Belgian companies were reachable on Peppol more or less by default. That changed: Hermes was decommissioned on 31 December 2025, so Belgian companies are no longer pre-registered, and a send to a buyer with no service provider now fails at the lookup step. What changes when a Belgian buyer is not on Peppol explains how to tell a genuine unreachable buyer from a fault at your end, which are different problems with different answers.

The instinct here is to fall back to email, and in some countries that is exactly what a good system does — a German or Dutch buyer who is not on the network can be emailed a PDF with the structured invoice embedded inside it, and their accounting software can still read it. Belgium is the exception. It does not accept a PDF by email as a business-to-business invoice, so a fallback that quietly emails one has not delivered your invoice; it has only stopped telling you that it failed. Our storefront apps therefore say so on the order rather than pretending the invoice arrived.

That leaves you with a commercial conversation rather than a technical one: your buyer needs to be reachable on the network, which for them means appointing a service provider. It is a short conversation, and it is much shorter before the sale than after it.

One thing to be clear about: this page does not state what the failure costs you. Belgium's administrative fines and the end of the tolerance period are real and they are set out in what non-compliance actually costs rather than repeated here, because a figure quoted second-hand in the wrong place is how a wrong number spreads.

How do refunds and cancellations work?

A refund is a credit note that references the original invoice and travels the same way it did.

Online retail has habits that a manual invoicing process never had to survive: partial refunds, returned items, double-clicked checkouts, gateway retries. Each has one correct answer under a structured-invoicing regime, and the answers are not intuitive if you have only ever issued PDFs.

• A refund raises a credit note, not a deletion and not a replacement invoice. The credit note carries a reference to the invoice it corrects and is delivered over Peppol like any other document. On both storefront apps you refund in your shop exactly as you always have, and the document follows.
• A cancelled order before delivery is the same shape of problem with the same answer.
• A duplicate is not a second invoice. A double-clicked checkout or a gateway retry must return the original document rather than minting a new one. One sale, one invoice, ever — and a system that does otherwise creates a reconciliation problem for your buyer as well as for you.
• A refused document has to be visible. A document the network rejected should be explained on the order in words and retried where retrying helps, never silently dropped and never allowed to block your checkout.

The rule underneath all four: the structured document is the legal invoice, so the ordinary corrections your shop already performs now have to produce ordinary corrections on the network too.

What format does the invoice have to be in?

Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, which is UBL 2.1 aligned to the European semantic standard EN 16931.

You are not going to build this, and you should not try. Your shop sends the order; the access point produces the document, validates it against the Belgian rules and delivers it. That division matters for one practical reason: when the Belgian rules change — and the five-corner reporting step is already scheduled — validation and rendering happening on the provider's side means your store is current without a plugin update. Belgium's country page carries the format, the identifier scheme and the public-sector side of the regime in one place.

What this looks like on WooCommerce and on Wix

Both are live, and both are free to start.

• WooCommerce. The GoRoute plugin is on the WordPress plugin directory and works with WordPress 6.0+ and WooCommerce 8.0+, including High-Performance Order Storage and the block checkout. It hooks the payment-complete event, so Mollie, Stripe, PayPal, bank transfer and cash on delivery all behave identically: paid business order in, e-invoice out. Set-up is about ten minutes and needs no developer and no API key to paste. The detail is on WooCommerce e-invoicing in Belgium, and the plugin itself is at wordpress.org/plugins/goroute-e-invoicing-for-woocommerce. The platform-wide view, across every country the plugin supports, is on the WooCommerce Peppol plugin page.
• Wix. The GoRoute app is on the Wix App Market and requires Wix Stores. It adds the checkout field, issues on payment, and writes the invoice number, the channel and the delivery state onto the Wix order itself. The detail is on Wix e-invoicing, and the listing is at the Wix App Market.

Both are free for the first fifty e-invoices a month, with paid plans above that. Wix plans are bought and billed inside Wix; WooCommerce plans are bought from GoRoute. The current ladder lives on each product page rather than in this article, because a price written into a blog post goes stale without anybody noticing.

What this page does not cover

Penalty amounts. They belong on the penalties page and are not restated here.

Any country but Belgium. Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand each have a different obligation and a different answer to the "buyer not on the network" case in particular. Do not read the Belgian answer across.

Your VAT treatment. Whether a given sale is a business-to-business supply, and how it is taxed, is a tax question rather than a document-exchange one. Nothing here is inferred about it.

Related Belgian guides

• Receiving your suppliers' e-invoices in Belgium — the other half of this rule: being reachable on Peppol, and reading what arrives.
• Belgium B2B e-invoicing 2026: what changed and how to stay compliant — the mandate itself: scope, exemptions, the format table and the five-corner roadmap.
• What non-compliance actually costs in Belgium — the fines, the tolerance period, and the larger commercial cost behind them.
• Why Peppol scheme 0208 is not optional for Belgian participants — the enterprise number, the check digit and what breaks at lookup.
• What changes when a Belgian buyer is not on Peppol — the Hermes decommissioning and how to read a failed lookup.
• When the Belgian mandate reaches a foreign company — establishment versus registration, for a shop run from outside Belgium.

What to do next

Find out today how many of your Belgian business buyers are actually reachable on Peppol. It is the number that decides whether this is a ten-minute install or a set of conversations with customers, and almost nobody knows it before they look.

Then install. On WooCommerce that is the plugin directory; on Wix it is the App Market listing. Recorded walkthroughs of the connectors are on tutorials, the document types, statuses and identifier formats are in the developer documentation, and the Belgian regime in full is on our Belgium page. To walk your own checkout and refund flow against these rules with our team, book a session.

Sources: Belgium's business-to-business e-invoicing obligation in force since 1 January 2026, under the framework set by FPS Finance; the OpenPeppol BIS Billing 3.0 specification for the format and the 0208 identifier scheme; the OpenPeppol directory for participant reachability and the Hermes decommissioning of 31 December 2025. Product behaviour — the checkout field, the reachability check, the credit-note path and the Belgian exception to the email fallback — is GoRoute's own, described on the WooCommerce Belgium page and the Wix page. GoRoute operates certified Peppol Access Point POP000991.