Automatic Tax Calculations

Automatic Tax Calculations

automatic-tax-calculations Automatic Tax CalculationsWhen you set up an online e-commerce shopping cart, the website tax calculator is a fundamental feature you’ll want to attain. Website tax calculators are invaluable assets when shipping your small business’ products out to your customers.

When you run an e-commerce website, you will need to charge e-commerce tax. This tax is the same as the sales tax charged in a brick and mortar retail store. Your online shopping cart will work more efficiently with an automatic sales tax calculator integrated into it. There are a variety of ways to use and manage tax calculators.

When to Charge Sales Tax

You must charge sales tax when your state or your customer’s state requires it. Also, sales tax will depend on the product you are selling and if you are using a third-party drop shipper. If your products are in a different state than you or your customer, it could create a different sales tax rate. When your customers enter their zip code, the automatic sales tax calculator will determine the sales tax rate for their state.

Being in Sales Tax Compliance

For any state you are selling products in you must be sales tax compliant.

  1. Contact the state’s Department of Revenue to register for a sales tax permit. You will receive your sales tax permit and a filing frequency. The more you sell, the more often you will file your sales tax. Obtaining a permit tells your customers you are legit and not just pocketing the extra money.
  2. Integrate automatic sales tax calculators in your online shopping carts.
  3. At your designated filing times, ensure you are properly reporting and filing the sales tax you have collected for each state.

Obtaining and Integrating Automatic Sales Tax Calculation

Most online storefronts offer an automatic sales tax calculator which come with a nominal fee every month. However, you can have a sales tax calculator built into your website to save you the monthly fee. If you do not have website development or web design knowledge, we can help.

Flying Cow Design provides a variety of web design services that include website sales tax calculation integration. Our website developers integrate the following features into the sales tax calculator to make running your business easier on you.

  • Tax mode – This will figure out which tax rate for calculating taxes. This is either the tax rate of a client’s shipping address location or the country tax rate. It can even be the tax rate of the vendor/store location or in EU Mode. It does not matter where the products are shipped.
  • Virtual Tax – This figures out whether products with ‘0’ weight are tax or non-tax. This feature is only used in ‘Ship to Address’ based Tax Mode.
  • Multiple Tax Rates – If you have items with different tax rates, such as clothes and books, it enables various tax rates.
  • Discount Before Tax Shipping – This feature will deduct the discount for a chosen payment ‘before’ or ‘after’ tax and shipping.

Here are a few features that will make life a lot easier:

  • Setup and forget
  • Automatic process
  • Calculate sales tax for shipments within the state when needed
  • Update and manage screens when tax rates change
  • Automatically added to an order
  • Variety of ways to calculate taxes
  • Available in shopping cart e-commerce solutions for free

When you have sales tax calculation technology installed on your e-commerce website, it will save you a considerable amount of time. Website tax calculators will also protect you from a bundle of grief during tax time!


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