Taxes. Setting defaults, and different zones.
Taxes are generally location based. This means that you need to know the customer’s location before you can show them tax. That means that until you gather customer information, your cart’s taxes will be set at $0 unless you have a default location set. This article shows you how to set up a default for taxes, and then gather user input for more accurate taxing based on the customer’s actual location.
Setting a Default
1. Go to the following settings page: Cartthrob Extension > Shipping & Taxes > Default Customer Locations (see Figure 1) and set default locations. This will tell the system that by default, the customer is located in your preset location (Missouri, zip code 63303 for instance.) If you never collect any location information for this customer during the entire process, they will be charged the tax appropriate for this default location.
OR
1. Go to the following settings page: Cartthrob Extension > Shipping & Taxes > Taxes and create a “Global” tax rate. This will apply everywhere, unless it is overridden by another shipping location. This global rate means that by default everyone will be charged tax, no matter where they live.
THEN
2. Set additional Tax Settings as needed (New York, zip code 10001 for instance)
3. During your customer’s visit, capture your customer’s location (I suggest using the save_customer_info_form, or update_cart_form to gather the customer’s information. Once you’ve captured the customer’s location, the appropriate tax setting for your customer’s region will be used instead of the default.
Notes
Cascading Tax Settings
If you review Figure 2, you’ll see that there are two tax settings. If one or more of these settings applies to a customer’s location, only the lowest in the list will be used to calculate costs. In the case of Figure 2, a person in New York will be charged the Global Rate, while a person in the 63303 zip code will be charged the 10% tax set for that region.
Importing
Also, we’re asked from time to time if there’s a method to import tax tables. At this time there is not. If you have a large tax table, and need it imported, please contact us and we can import these settings for a small fee.
Stacking
At this time there is also no method to stack taxes (for instance apply both a state, and a local tax. This feature may be added in the future, please let us know if you need this feature, and we will be more likely to add it.
{examples_channel_configuration} {/examples_channel_configuration}Save Customer Info Form
This is a very basic implementation of the save customer info form… this is just enough for the system apply taxes based on a zipcode.
{exp:cartthrob:save_customer_info_form }
<input type="text" name="zip" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="submit" />
{/exp:cartthrob:save_customer_info_form}
Once you’ve set a default location, your customers will always see tax applied whether or not they have already supplied you with their location. There are also methods within CartThrob to override an item’s taxation, but that’s information for a future article.
