Dropshipping, variable tax rate and more

[ayn]

I have deployed OSC on various sites with great success, they were more "traditional" businesses that have their own inventory, and in states with a single sales tax.

 

I am currently working on a site that is more complicated.

 

First of all, not all items will be stocked by the business, some will be dropshipped from the suppliers, and they are located all over the U.S. OSC currently does not have the ability to correctly calculate shipping with multiple origin zipcodes. I've tried the multi-vendor mod but it doesn't quite do the same thing. There was a proposal on a mod that does this but I'm not sure if that went through.

 

Also, some states have different tax rates in differnet cities. At least in WA, if the business has warehouses in a different cities in WA, the warehouses' tax rates should be used to calculate sales tax.

 

I guess both of these could be solved if we can associate a origin zip code with each product, and probably its associated shipping method(s). The Muti-Vendor mod is close, but it doesn't handle different originating zipcodes. It should be pretty easy to hack OSC to do this though.

 

I'd like to hear what you guys think about this, give me some ideas if this will be useful. I'll probably go ahead and implement it. But this should be a fairly common problem and maybe somebody has already done it.

 

Thanks for reading! :)

 

--Andrew

[timbeckham]

We just collect the base state sales tax if the item is shipped to a customer in our home state of Pennsylvania. If it is to a PA city with a separate, additional tax (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, for instance), we just swallow the extra 1%. Usually our profit is enough to handle that small add without too much pain.

 

http://www.ironwork.com

 

Tax issues are so complex that, IMO, it is not worth the effort to solve them in detail. The small variation from city-to-city or locality-to-locality is simply an acceptable business expense, if it is necessary to pay it out of pocket.

 

Tim Beckham

[ayn]

Thanks for your input. Yeah, I agree that the differences are usually very minor that it might not be worthwhile to implement it as an additional feature. Though, it is somewhat related to the dropshipping problem, that is why I mentioned it.

 

--Andrew

[Guest]

Also, some states have different tax rates in differnet cities. At least in WA, if the business has  warehouses in a different cities in WA, the warehouses' tax rates should be used to calculate sales tax.

You would define them as separate zones (with different tax rates). This looks a little goofy as it looks sort of like you are saying Pittsburgh, PA is a separate state from the rest of Pennsylvania, but it will give you correct tax behavior.

 

Hth,

Matt