Charge state sales tax only on selective item#’s – is it possible?

[sales200022]

I know it sounds like an odd question. So let me give some background...We are a Florida based retailer who distributes merchandise that either ships directly from our Florida distributorship or drop ships from manufacturers located around the country. Being registered in Florida, we would usually only need to collect/report sales tax for Florida sales. However, due to regulations recently passed by California's BOE, we now need to collect/file CA sales tax for any order shipping to a California consumer when the merchandise is shipping from a California manufacturer (despite where the distributor is registered). More info on regulation 1706 can be found at following link:

http://www.boe.ca.gov/pdf/reg1706.pdf

Hence poses the problem. About 1/4 of our listed inventory ships directly from a CA based manufacturer and therefore obligates us to collect state sales tax when when ordered from a California customer. I can't just add an extra CA tax rule in the checkout column as then I would be entailing CA state sales tax for a large faction of inventory that doesn't qualify/necessitate CA tax to be collected. (this may also pose some legal issues)

So, is it possible to only require California sales tax for specific item#'s added to the cart when patron provides a CA ship address? Like add a field in the MYSQL database that only triggers a sales tax rule if buyer indicates they are located in California during checkout?

[Ray Borduin]

Yes. Add a column to your cart for "CATaxable" and set it to 1 or 0 when they add to the cart based on whether it is shipped from CA.

Then you can use that to creat a rule:

CATaxAmount = [Price] * [Quantity] * [CATaxable]

Then you can use the CATaxAmount when creating your tax rule which will be zero for all items that aren't taxable.... hopefully that makes sense, should be doable pretty easily.

[sales200022]

Thanks for the quick reply Ray...I'll give it a shot but these things usually sound easier then they are.


I haven't used the E-Cart software for quite some time…after 2 years with webassist, I've learned how to update/edit my pages just with going through the code so hopefully this won't be out of my league.


Thanks again, Erik