estore – bug in tax calculation setting w/paypal

[alina]

I sell 2 products – 1 digital and 1 physical.

I need to charge tax for physical ONLY in CA and ZERO tax for digital.

I had to use PayPal regional settings to make it charge tax only in CA (works)

however it charges tax for the DIGITAL goods as well, even though I set it to 0 in the item settings.

I followed instructions from:

How to Use/Configure Sales Tax (Regional or International) When Selling Through PayPal

If you do not wish to charge tax for a particular item (for example: a digital item) then set the individual item tax of that item to 0 (zero) and it will not charge any sales tax on that item. You can set the individual tax of a product from under the Shipping and Tax section of that product.

the above recomendation does not work – there is also a main setting called “enable tax calculation” and if I set that, then none of the tax works on paypal.

all help appreciated. Thanks!

[admin]

The issue is that PayPal doesn’t differentiate between digital or physical items when charging tax. Turn off the regional tax setup that you did in your PayPal account then try the following:

You can use the following option to charge tax only when your customer tells the cart that he/she is from a certain/selected area (for example: California).

1. Open the “eStore_advanced_configs.php” file find the following line of code:

define('WP_ESTORE_APPLY_TAX_FOR_CERTAIN_AREA', '0');

2. Once you find it change it to something like the following:

define('WP_ESTORE_APPLY_TAX_FOR_CERTAIN_AREA', 'California residents check here');

Save and update this file.

3. Go to eStore settings menu. Keep the “Enable tax calculation” checkbox unchecked but specify the tax rate you want to charge in the “Calculate Tax” field.

Now, there will be a checkbox in the shopping cart with the text you specified in step 2 of the above modification. When a customer checks that checkbox it will apply the sales tax (specified in step 3) to the shopping cart.

You can edit each product and apply a tax value of 0 for the products you don’t want to charge any tax and it won’t charge tax for those products.

[alina]

Hi – thank you for your response, however, your system DOES tell paypal NOT to charge tax when “enable tax calculation” is set (even though regional settings is on), however, it does this for ALL products, including ones that should be taxed.

So there is a clean way to do this, but its all or nothing. Meaning I kept paypal regional tax ON and depending on if I check “enable tax calculation” it will cause paypal to not add the tax on ALL products. If there is a way to do this on PER item basis as your instructions say is possible (putting a 0 in the tax for a specific item) that would be the BEST solution.

I feel that there is a way to do this without the round about way of asking the customers if they are in california – I am willing to edit the code but just prefer a clean way to do this.

thank you.

[admin]

I would love to do that too. I just wish PayPal had a way of specifying for each item if it should be taxed or not by the regional tax settings. If you sold one item at a time via eStore’s Buy Now button shortcode (not multiple item checkout) then it will work fine but that doesn’t solve the issue.

You are more than welcome to ask the following question to PayPal tech support and see what they say:

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Lets say I have two items A and B. I want only Item A to be affected by the regional sales tax that I configured in my profile. Is there a way to tell PayPal to only charge the regional sales tax for item A when a customer is checking out with both those items together?

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[alina]

Actually at this time I am using just the buy now buttons (1 for each product – no multiple items) so how can I do this as you said?

[wpCommerce]

@alina, I sent you an email with the updated eStore plugin. Please install that version and do a transaction with the “Buy Now” button to see if it works. You will need to specify 0 in the Item Specific Tax field if you do not wish to apply regional tax on your digital item (it’s under WP eStore->Add/Edit Products->Shipping & Tax section).

[alina]

Thank you so much! that did the trick!! Honestly that was almost a show stopper for me, but since you responded so quickly and fixed it, I am truly impressed and very pleased with using this shopping cart! thank you!! great product and great service!!

[Author]

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