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I'm using 2.3.0.2, and I have the Avalara Tax and Ultimate Shipping extensions installed. My client has stores in California, USA, and they have rather complicated shipping and sales tax requirements, as shown below:

1) There are five stores. If the customer wants to pick up their order in one of the stores, they should be charged sales tax based on the store location. Each of the five stores has a different sales tax rate.

2) My client offers an in-house shipping service, because many of their products are too large for FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc. If the customer wants to use the in-house shipping service, they should be charged the appropriate amount for shipping, and they should be charged for sales tax based on the shipping address. The shipping charges should be taxed.

3) If a customer orders a smaller product, my client will ship it using FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc. In that case, the customer should be charged the appropriate amount for shipping, and they should be charged sales tax at the rate for my customer's headquarters store. The shipping charges should not be taxed.

Using Avalara Tax and Ultimate Shipping, I can meet some, but not all of the requirements listed above. I've looked around, but can't find a solution. I'd appreciate some help!

Thanks!

Ultimate Shipping should be able to handle the taxes on the shipping cost, but not the products. What you'd want to do is set up two tax classes: one for the customer's shipping address, and one for the store address (which should be your company's HQ store address).

Then, you can set two different charges in Ultimate Shipping to handle the different tax rates for different products. You can set up multiple rates for each product / group you have in your store, then use a different Tax Class rule each product according to where it ships from (and how it should be taxed). You can combine those rates together using a Charge Combination, which should apply the relevant taxes for each product / group in the cart.

Since you're using a custom tax extension, you'll probably need to make sure it calculates only on a certain Tax Class (i.e. the one for products that tax on the customer's shipping address). That way, it should activate that tax for only those products, and then activate the store's tax class for the products that should be charged that. I'm not sure if the Avalara extension can do that, and if you need the tax amount sent to Avalara for reporting, then it's probably not going to work for you.

For that, and for the first requirement if you also need that tax sent to Avalara, you're going to need to modify the Avalara extension. There's not much that can be done in Ultimate Shipping if you want to send the tax amount, since that would be handled completely by the Avalara extension.

If you want to discuss anything else related to Ultimate Shipping and haven't already, you can contact me www.getclearthinking.com/contact