Lately I’ve been busy coding stuff for Windows Phone 7 –really fun! If you are a Swiss individual (i.e. you are not developing your apps for a company) then joining the Marketplace is not very straightforward. If you reside in another non-U.S. country you may as well read this post, I suppose you will only have to make minor changes to the procedure.
Sascha Corti of Microsoft Switzerland has provided a great walkthrough, but I whish to add a couple of things, in particular re. obtaining your notarized passport copy.
Sign up
First, you can sign-up to the App Hub on create.msdn.com. You need a credit card to pay the CHF 129 annual fee. Be careful: the publisher name is final and cannot be changed later. So think about it for a minute and if you are not sure wait until you’ve decided what to display as your apps’ publisher.
Payee Details
When you are signed-up and have clicked on all the confirmation links you receive, you have to log into your account and fill in your bank account data under my account/payee details. If you only have a Post account, no problem, use the Post’s IBAN calculator –they also provide the BIC and correct address.
At this point you are ready to submit your applications to the marketplace, but you may want to continue reading. In fact as you probably already know, you will receive 70% of your app’s total sales, the other 30% being kept by Microsoft. The problem is that as a non-U.S. resident, another 30% will be removed from your part –which is a rather big hit IMO! Keep in mind that you will have to pay Swiss taxes on the income, so in the end not much will be left in your hands.
That’s why you have to provide some documentation proving that you are indeed paying taxes on your country –so that the U.S. won’t charge you that infamous additional 30%. In practice, it means asking an ITIN number to the U.S. International Revenue Service and giving it to Microsoft.
Notarized Copy
To ask an ITIN number you need a certified true copy of your passport. The IRS is rather strict on this aspect and won’t accept notarized copies from entities not in their list. This excludes the Swiss Post and probably anything else except the U.S. Embassy.
So -unless you live in Bern or Zurich and can take an appointment- you will have to send the following:
- your passport
- a copy of your passport
- the filled-in W7 form (more on that later)
- the Microsoft printed letter (more on that later)
- a CHF 1.00 stamped envelope with your address
to this address:
U.S. Embassy
Consular Section
P.O. Box
3001 Bern
and at the same time, pay CHF 50.- (plus the 18.- postal fee) to
American Consular Services
Sulgeneckstrasse 19
3007 Bern
Yiikes! This will probably be the most expensive photocopy of your life (also considering that you made the copy itself :-) ), but they don’t have a post/bank account so you cannot avoid the 18.- fee.
W7 Form
In some days you will receive your notarized passport copy (and hopefully your passport) back. You are now ready to forward the W7 form. If you sent it to the embassy, they will probably have checked it for obvious mistakes, but I have not yet received mine back so I cannot tell at this time.
Anyways the W7 form can be downloaded here. Fill it in as explained in Sascha Corti’s presentation. In particular make sure that you check point a. and h., and enter “Exception 1 (d) – Royalty Income” at point h., plus “12” as treaty article number.
Now log into your Marketplace account, go to the payee details page, scroll down until you find “Click here to download the Microsoft letter”, download the letter, print it and hand-write the date and your full name. Make sure the letter includes Todd Biggs signature at the end. A previous version did not include the signature and applications were rejected because of it.
Now send W7 and the letter to
International Revenue Service
ITIN Operations
P.O. Box 149342
Austin, TX 78714-9342
United States of America
After n weeks they will hopefully assign you an ITIN number.
W-8BEN form
With your ITIN in hand, you can finally fill in the W-8BEN form, print it, sign it and send it to
Microsoft
’Windows Marketplace for Mobile’
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052
United States of America
Once they receive and process it you should be free of the 30% tax and receive your full 70% royalties. As far as I understand it this is not retro-active, i.e. the taxes you previously paid won’t be reimbursed.
That’s all
This should be all (I never said it was simple ;-) ). It takes some effort, time and money (about CHF 80.- one-time plus the annual 129.- fee), but if you are doing some interesting apps it may be worth it as you will hopefully earn it back soon.
UPDATE:
Getting your ITIN number from the IRS can take a long time. It took me more than 3 months since I sent the W7 form. Send it with signed mail for piece of mind, and be patient, they will eventually answer.