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Sensible folks put together their eCommerce platforms in such a fashion that enacting this legislation is a single config flag. US sales tax is a pain in the a

by madaxe 13y ago

Sensible folks put together their eCommerce platforms in such a fashion that enacting this legislation is a single config flag. US sales tax is a pain in the ass, however, largely because you end up with (after state, county and city tax) percentages like 4.568398%, and you end up in rounding hell, particularly if you sell items which cost $0.05. Either way, it's moot. It'll never make it into law, house republicans will block it.

dangrossman 13y ago
This could never be implemented as a single config flag. You need, at minimum, 50 new inputs on every product listing screen in your store administration screen, in order to categorize each product separately for each state. Say you sell coffee -- one state does not tax that as a basic food, one state does tax it as a luxury good, one state does tax it because they don't tax any foods but do tax coffee... You can't program this problem away.
- madaxe 13y ago
  Yes, you can. We maintain a comprehensive list of taxable good types - very atomic, includes stuff like different kinds of tobacco products, children's car seats, different kinds of food and drink. Each product is categorised into one of these "product tax types", once. The PTTs map to differently ID'd bands of taxation in each state, county, city. It's a lot of data, but it's out there, for the most part. So yeah, it is just a config flag.
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    Mapping the products to those PTTs for each state requires up to ~50 inputs per product. You're saying they can be select boxes instead of text boxes; big deal. Those mappings have to be made by some person. That's not a config flag. I run an online store counterpart to a family-owned retail store; that's hundreds of SKUs I'll need to go through and figure out how they're classified in each separate state. Software can't do it for me.
    - madaxe 13y ago
      Nah, you only map to a single PTT, and those are then mapped internally to state tax codes. i.e. you say "its diapers" and we then go "it fits in this band in Des Moines, this band in Culver City, this band in Podunk, etc.". As to having to do it for every product - nope - we allow bulk flagging of any datum against products by category or product metadata. Sure, there's manual work there, but there's no additional requirement for any of our merchants, as they've already got this data in place for the appropriate calculation of tax rates when they're shipping intra-state. If we didn't have it set up this way, our some of our customers with millions of SKUs would have man-decades of work ahead of them!

by madaxe 13y ago

dangrossman 13y ago

This could never be implemented as a single config flag. You need, at minimum, 50 new inputs on every product listing screen in your store administration screen, in order to categorize each product separately for each state. Say you sell coffee -- one state does not tax that as a basic food, one state does tax it as a luxury good, one state does tax it because they don't tax any foods but do tax coffee... You can't program this problem away.

madaxe 13y ago
Yes, you can. We maintain a comprehensive list of taxable good types - very atomic, includes stuff like different kinds of tobacco products, children's car seats, different kinds of food and drink. Each product is categorised into one of these "product tax types", once. The PTTs map to differently ID'd bands of taxation in each state, county, city. It's a lot of data, but it's out there, for the most part. So yeah, it is just a config flag.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  Mapping the products to those PTTs for each state requires up to ~50 inputs per product. You're saying they can be select boxes instead of text boxes; big deal. Those mappings have to be made by some person. That's not a config flag. I run an online store counterpart to a family-owned retail store; that's hundreds of SKUs I'll need to go through and figure out how they're classified in each separate state. Software can't do it for me.
  - madaxe 13y ago
    Nah, you only map to a single PTT, and those are then mapped internally to state tax codes. i.e. you say "its diapers" and we then go "it fits in this band in Des Moines, this band in Culver City, this band in Podunk, etc.". As to having to do it for every product - nope - we allow bulk flagging of any datum against products by category or product metadata. Sure, there's manual work there, but there's no additional requirement for any of our merchants, as they've already got this data in place for the appropriate calculation of tax rates when they're shipping intra-state. If we didn't have it set up this way, our some of our customers with millions of SKUs would have man-decades of work ahead of them!