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Tax for Multiple Regions

My understanding is that the tax locations are set up by the country in the Shipping Address. However, we are based in Canada, and tax rates change depending on which province you are in. We have a federal tax (GST) a provincial tax (PST) and some provinces combine the two into a flat tax (HST).

If it can't be done automatically, I need someway to allow either the user to select which province they are residing in and that to dictate the tax rate. I'm a bit confused because it looks like I can create different rates within a location, (So I can set a tax rate for each province within a "Canada" location) - but I'm not sure how to extract that data and apply it to the customer's order.

Any help would be appreciated.

Herman Steuernagel

Herman Steuernagel 0 points

  • 4 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

The different rates within the location are for different tax rates based on what's being sold. So you might have standard rate, reduced rate etc. For example, in the UK we have a standard 20% rate tax on goods and services, but there's also a reduced rate of 5% on things like children's car safety seats, and a zero-rate for essential foods, children's clothes etc.

What you need is multiple locations to represent your different provinces.

Ok, so that doesn't entirely answer my question though - since the cart determines the tax by the customer's country, how do I indicate to the cart which tax location to use?

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

You'll need to use the location form to let the customer pick the location from a list.

Thanks I knew it was something obvious.

Does this same logic apply then, if it's not the handful of Canadian provinces, but the 50 states in the US? I need to charge sales tax only when the buyer is in California, for example - should I have 50 rates in the location "United States" (one for each state), even though only one of them would be non-zero?