So I have to set up about 15 states with a bunch of different tax rates so I went and searched around for some tax tables. I found some great spreadsheets which will make doing what I need to do, pretty easy. One of the things I did run across though was Avalara. They actually have free tax tables to download at http://www.taxrates.com/
Avalara says they can do sales tax automation. So I'm figuring that means that it could connect (with the right connector) to CS-Cart and then if a state's sales taxes change, their system changes, which means it would automatically change in CS-Cart.
You can see more about their API at http://www.avalara.com/products/sdk
Now, I will admit, I haven't checked on the pricing of this, but do you developer types think this is possible with CS-Cart? Can it be integrated like I think it can?
Thanks,
Brandon
You're right - our system provides real-time up-to-date tax calculation, with rooftop-level jurisdictional data, and product taxability information. You would make an outgoing API call to our service when you wanted to calculate tax, and we would return the tax - at either the document, line, or jurisdictional detail, depending on the request parameters. You can also record the transaction on our database and use our reports to reconcile and fill out your jurisdictional returns (included in the service), or have us file your sales tax returns for you (for a fee). The calculation is charged on a per-transaction basis, the more transactions you buy, the cheaper each one is. If you're interested in finding out how much it would be, you should talk to our sales folks for a quote.
The API itself is pretty simple, and we offer both a SOAP API and a REST API.
If you want to know more about integrating to the AvaTax service for calculation, you might want to check out the documentation here: [url=“Avalara Developer”]Avalara Developer, which covers the resources available and best practice recommendations on creating an integration, and you can also create a free trial account.
Is there an interface to download daily tax tables to be integrated into cs-cart internal tax engine? I would be reluctant to use a real-time lookup for taxes.
Tony,
I'm not sure if Anya will respond or not, but on taxrates.com, you can download the tables. I'm not sure how often they are updated though. The biggest thing about manually downloading them is putting them all into some type of order to be able to use them with CS-Cart. I did this for 15 states and ended up with 48 different tax rates. This meant that I had to create 48 locations, which was obviously a pain in the butt.
To keep up with the rate changes, I'll have to download the states with their rates and then update each location. Not exactly all that fun and something that is very time consuming.
What is wrong with real-time rates for taxes? Would there be a reason why this would be a bad thing to do?
Personally, I don't understand the whole tax rate thing. I just charge one rate for all of California, but apparently that is wrong? Maybe I should just move up your way. Get into Oregon and not have any sales tax at all. Now that sounds nice. I bought a computer from Best Buy up in Medford a few months ago. Kind of nice to save the $80 or so.
Thanks,
Brandon
Well, we don't really want any more Califorinians moving to Oregon. But…
My concern with RT rates is the performance hit for the network request, but not having to store the data has advantage. When do you get taxes? When added to the cart? When checkout is entered? Some items could be taxed in some states and not in others or an item might even be taxed in one state, but not by the county or city, but another item in the cart might be. Taxes are basically a mess to deal with, especially when not local to you. In a brick/mortar business, you know what's taxed and how it's split up based on where your store is located. But as an internet company, determining what taxes to apply to Podunk Kansas is fraught with error when you live in Sacramento Ca…
Yes, in Ca. you should be taxing by state, county and sometimes city (or even districts within cities in some cases). If you sell a hotel reservation (or similar travel services), you might have even different rates.
The advantage of a service is that they have to figure all that out. But you have to classify the products in a manner they can use to compute the proper tax.
Sales tax can get extremely complex, and from our perspective real time tax data is king. Storing tax rates is not a recommended compliance practice. Our rates include more than where and when something should be taxed – we also take into account how many and how much [Caps and Thresholds] and Tax Holidays, etc.
We've invested heavily in developing strategies to ensure that our AvaTax web services stay online 24 x 7 x 365. Although outages have been historically infrequent and short, we encourage developing “contingency plans†of your own, and we have a fantastic tool for this in our admin console (read more here [url=“Avalara Developer”]Avalara Developer)
When it comes to “classifying products†Special product taxability rules can be defined using Item and/or TaxCodes (read more here [url=“Avalara Developer”]Avalara Developer)
We've just had cs-cart create a custom mod to integrate with their tax service. On the check out page it will query their service for sales tax amounts for each product. When the customer actually checks out it will write the order info including sales tax amounts to our AvaTax account. It's taken months for them to get it working. The test site works properly. We're waiting on cs-cart to integrate it into our live store. We'll let you know how it goes, should be this week.
We are doing the same as tjordan is doing. We developing a addon to call to Avatax to pull real-time rates. You don't want to manage your own tax tables. They make it painless. So far so good and Avatax is very affordable.
tjordan,
did cs-cart integrated it to your live store? Is it a custom mod that is public? Can we use it? I realy appriciate it if you can provide more details. We need to integrate with Avalara, and if there is something that we can reuse instead of developing it from scratch it will be very helpful.
Thanks,
Amir
[quote name='tjordan' timestamp='1351622680' post='148007']
We've just had cs-cart create a custom mod to integrate with their tax service. On the check out page it will query their service for sales tax amounts for each product. When the customer actually checks out it will write the order info including sales tax amounts to our AvaTax account. It's taken months for them to get it working. The test site works properly. We're waiting on cs-cart to integrate it into our live store. We'll let you know how it goes, should be this week.
[/quote]
Is it a custom mod that is public? Can we use it? I realy appriciate it if you can provide more details, very interested!!
I also need a solution and Strikeiron is expensive and they wanted $150 a month for 500 lookups. I am a small business, not a cash cow.