WooCommerce default setting silently inflates checkout prices for EU digital product buyers

A self-hosted WooCommerce store owner discovered that a digital product listed at €49 was charging Hungarian customers €51.85 at checkout — a discrepancy caused by EU VAT rules requiring tax to be applied at the buyer's local rate. By default, WooCommerce stores the entered price as a pre-tax figure and recalculates the final amount per country, meaning the displayed price and checkout price can diverge without any error or warning. The issue stems from a fundamental trade-off: either the consumer-facing price stays fixed across the EU while the seller's margin varies, or the margin stays fixed while the price changes per country. WooCommerce silently defaults to protecting the seller's margin, which can violate EU consumer pricing rules that require the advertised price to match what customers actually pay. The problem can be resolved with a single line of code — a WooCommerce filter that locks the tax-inclusive price across all regions — but the setting is not enabled by default.