Taxes
Where you owe tax, what your products are classed as, and why eCrate will not guess either for you.
Setting it up
Settings → Taxes holds one row per jurisdiction: a country, or a country and a region where the region matters (US states, Canadian provinces). Each row carries a rate, and a switch for whether that place taxes shipping as well as goods.
Add a row for each place you have decided you must charge tax. Somewhere with no row is not taxed.
Inclusive or exclusive — pick once
One store-level switch decides how your prices are read:
| Setting | Means | Usual for |
|---|---|---|
| Tax-exclusive | Your prices are before tax; tax is added at checkout | US |
| Tax-inclusive | Your prices already contain the tax | UK, EU, Australia |
Switching to tax-inclusive does not move your prices. A £120 product stays £120; the tax inside it is worked out and recorded separately, and the shopper still pays £120.
Tax classes
Some things are taxed differently from everything else — food, children's clothing, books, depending on where you are. A tax class is how you say so: create the class, give it its own rate inside a jurisdiction, and pick it on the product's Tax card. A product with no class uses that jurisdiction's default rate.
What happens at checkout
Tax is worked out from the shipping address, and appears as its own line as soon as the shopper enters one. Until then there is no address, so there is no tax to show.
The rate each line was charged at is written onto the order.
What eCrate does not do
- Work out where you owe tax. No nexus tracking, no threshold monitoring, no registration advice.
- File or remit returns. Your reports and your accountant do that.
- Handle customs, duties or import charges on international orders. The shopper's own country may charge them on delivery.