Live Currency Rates and Taxes - Powered by Kayako eSupport Help Desk Software

08 Sep 2010

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	Live Currency Rates and Taxes

Solution Here’s how the currency (and geoip) module currently works with taxes.
The key thing to note is that taxes are applied based on the customer’s (bill to or ship to) country not on the currency they select.

When the customer is visiting the store front:
• if they are not logged in, either:
o the visitor’s country is set to be the ‘Default (anonymous) customer options : Default country’.
o Or if the store has the GeoIP module installed and the option ‘Set General settings - default country via GeoIP’ is active, then the visitor’s country is set to the country determined by their IP address.
• If they are logged in
o The visitor’s country is set by their profile settings

When you define a tax rate, you specify which zone to apply it to.
If you specify a zone that includes the visitor’s country (as defined above), then the store will calculate taxes for this visitor.
If for instance you defined a tax rate of 10%, for Australian customers and the store visitor was determined (by the above methods) to be from Australia, then 10% tax would be applied to their prices.
If they were viewing a product priced at 80AUD, and the tax option was to ‘Display product price including tax’, then they would see 88 AUD (including GST).
If they changed the currency to say EUR, this would not change their country, so the EUR prices would also include GST.

However, if they changed their store profile and specified a different shipping or billing country that did not have a tax rate defined for the countries destination zone, depending on whether the defined tax rate option ‘rates depend on’ was applied to billing or shipping addresses, the tax would not be applied if the tax rate was not applicable.

Similarly if their country was not determined to be in a taxable destination zone, no taxes would be applied.

The module is setup this way because is some countries, particularly European countries, you might wish to allow customers to pay in different currencies, but need to collect taxes regardless of the currency they choose.

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21 Aug 2009 12:32 PM