Problem with Shipping fee's and sales tax

Store Builder Questions
1

Hey everyone. I just purchased CS-Cart a few days ago. I came from a self-made e-commerce site that I custom tailored to suit my needs. I use PayPal to process all product orders. One thing I should point out is that I use a flat shipping rate for each product and I assign a value for each product in my admin area.



I noticed in CS-Cart it has a “Shipping Freight” value. When I added my products, I set this value to my flat rate shipping fee for that product. I was unable to figure out how to get CS-Cart to tally up the “Shipping Freight” values for each product during checkout time.



To try to get around this problem, I resorted to making an option for each product called “Shipping”. Here I assigned a “Standard” shipping amount for each item as a radio box. Unfortunately when the customer is viewing the product, it automatically adjusts the price to reflect this “Shipping fee”. That being a small price to pay, everything seemed to be working ok. I ran a test purchase and realized that it was adding sales tax to both the product price AND the shipping price because its automatically added together. I never charged sales tax on shipping fee’s in the past and I know many other sites do not either.



My Goals:

  • Figure out how to get CS-Cart to treat the “Shipping Freight” as the shipping cost for each product, and add it to the sum of the products once in the shopping cart


  • Find a way to utilize the “Shipping Freight” value so that it passes this amount to PayPal as a “Shipping Fee”. This way it will only tax the product, not the shipping



    My site is: http://www.RacingSolution.com
2

CS-Cart mostly does what you want.



Create a new manual shipping method (e.g., Standard shipping) and set the shipping charges as follows:



Cost dependences

PRODUCTS COST RATE VALUE TYPE

More than $ 0 .01 Absolute



Make sure no taxes are checked on the General tab



Using this method, the shipping costs specified in Shipping freight will be tallied and .01 will be added. No tax will be added if none are checked.



The reason I say it mostly works is that there is no way to define a shipping method that will add no additional charge.



Bob

3

Thanks Bob I’ll give that a shot. I haven’t been able to find a cart system that allows strictly flat rate shipping fee’s which was why I stayed with my same site for 7 years.

4

Ok so I added the shipping method you recommended and I un-checked the box that says “Disable Shipping” … when you go to checkout it says there are no shipping methods available. I made sure the new shipping method was enabled.

5

Do you have shipping charges set up for the shipping location - the little links across the top of the shipping charges?



I don’t remember for sure but you may need to have a weight on your items even though you are not using weights in your calculation. Try adding the weight to one product and see if you can ship that.



Bob

6

[quote name=‘jobosales’]Do you have shipping charges set up for the shipping location - the little links across the top of the shipping charges?



I don’t remember for sure but you may need to have a weight on your items even though you are not using weights in your calculation. Try adding the weight to one product and see if you can ship that.



Bob[/QUOTE]



I had the the Default Location (all countries) disabled in the Locations area… with that enabled, it performed just like you said it would. Here’s a thought. If we add $.01 to the product cost, can’t we add another condition to deduct $.01 so it balances out?

7

Ahh yes! That worked Bob. I set it to add 1.00 if the product cost is “More than $0” and then deduct $1.00 if the Product Quantity is “more than 0 items” … That balanced it out and totaled the shipping freight for multiple items as well



Thanks for all your help

8

[quote name=‘racingsolution’]Ahh yes! That worked Bob. I set it to add 1.00 if the product cost is “More than $0” and then deduct $1.00 if the Product Quantity is “more than 0 items” … That balanced it out and totaled the shipping freight for multiple items as well[/QUOTE]

Very cool. I had never thought of trying that. Hopefully, they do not “fix” this in the future.



Bob

9

[quote name=‘racingsolution’]Ahh yes! That worked Bob. I set it to add 1.00 if the product cost is “More than $0” and then deduct $1.00 if the Product Quantity is “more than 0 items” … That balanced it out and totaled the shipping freight for multiple items as well[/QUOTE]

I knew this had been answered before. Here is the method recommended by the developers for setting up a free shipping method:

[url]CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.15.x documentation



Bob

10

Yep that works… Seems a little safer than adding and then subtracting



Thanks