Technically VATs are almost always collected from customers, and paid by companies. A higher corporate income tax will affect consumer prices too. The bigger difference is that VATs are taxes on consumption, and not on earnings which alters consumer and corporate incentives and behaviour.

That's not entirely accurate. Companies do pay VAT, but then can deduct it if they're not the end users. This is unlike sales tax, where only end users are taxed (there's usually no sales tax payment in the sales chain).