Tax not working

I am setting up my checkout page and it’s not yet completely finished. However when testing my Shopping Cart I don’t see the Sub-total and Tax. I see only Grand total.
I see the Sub-total and Tax appear randomly when I do this:

I click on one of the ‘Add to Cart’ button, to simulate shopping, while in ‘Shopping Cart’ page I click on ‘Checkout’ button it directs me to ‘checkout’ page.
I fill in the Billing Information and check the ‘Same as billing address’ and click on ‘Checkout’ button.

I am redirected to a blank page that says: Table 'lumierep_cj.orders' doesn't exist.
I am not surprised to see this message because I did not finished yet the entire setup (this is not the problem).
From this page I click on ‘Go back one page’ (two times) in the Browser until I see Shopping cart and suddenly the Sub-total and Tax appear.
Can you please check out this issue? I want to make sure if I did something wrong in my setup or it’s probably an incompatibility between the eCart5 and some browsers.
Here is the link of my testing website:link removed

Please remove the link when you don’t need it.
Thank you.

I have the same problem in the below Browsers:
Mac:
Firefox 3.5.5
Safari 4.0.5

PC:
Internet Explorer 8
Firefox 3.6.3

This is normal behavior.

If there is no tax, shipping or other charges applied, it will only show the grand total.

The tax is not calculated untill the checkout page posts to the confirm page, this is when the Billing State is known to determine whether the tax should be applied or not.

Jason,
Thanks for fast reply.
I think there is misunderstanding.
Tax calculates correctly but Not Showing Consistently.

Please read attentively my thread and have a test with this link:

I am surprised why in my post the "Any Bug in eCart5?" title changed to 'Tax not working'. This is not fair to change the subject because I cannot get the right answer to my question.

Regards.

I did read your entire question, I changed the subject to better reflect the question being asked.

This is not a bug in eCart5, rather it is a problem with taxes being applied.

The taxes are based on the Billing state that is entered in the checkout form on the checkout page.

When the checkout form posts to the confirm page, the billing state is stored in a session variable.

The tax calculation is triggered on 1) The existence of this session variable and 2) The value of the session variable.

If it is set to the correct state, the tax will display any time you view the cart page.

It cannot display the tax before going through the checkout page to the confirm page, because the billing state is not known yet.

This is not a bug in eCart, it is the way it is supposed to work.

As I mentioned in my previous post the Tax calculation works fine after go through the process that I explained and I can see the added tax value.

Why I see the correct added tax value in shopping card after going through the process I explained above?

Thank you

as I explained before, that is the workflow that triggers the tax calculation.

when the user first adds an item to the cart, they have not set the billing state, so tax cannot be applied. You have no way to know if they are from California or Timbuktu.

On the checkout page, they set the billing state. The checkout page posts to the confirm page where the billing state is now stored in a session variable.

That session variable is used to determine if tax applies or not.

the scope of a session variable is to maintain it's value until the browse is closed.

when you go back to the cart page, the session variable still has the selected billing state, so tax can be triggered to display it.

  when the user first adds an item to the cart, they have not set the billing state, so tax cannot be applied.  

Hi Jayson,
Sorry for my naive question. According to what you mentioned above that tax cannot be applied in the shopping cart,
my question is why we are asked to show the tax with Summary,Individual and Don't show options in Display Manager Wizard for creating a shopping cart page ?
Thanks.

the tax CAN be shown in the shopping cart, but only after the user has progressed through the checkout page to set their billing state.

If the user gets to the confirm page, and then decides to continue shopping, the tax will be shown on the cart page.

also, the settings you apply to the cart page are the settings that will be applied to the cart display on the confirm page.

Thanks Jason for the explanation, It makes sense.
I'll be back for setting up and finalizing the checkout page and I will certainly need your help and assistance.
Regards.