Removing VAT on shipping for zero rated products

[mrg]

Hi,



I wonder if anyone can help.



I built a site for my client which sells children's products, writing sets, books, cards etc and a couple of items are exempt from VAT due to them falling into an 'educational' category. My issue is that I don't seem to be able to make these products exempt from VAT on shipping, so does anyone know if this is possible?



In general, when I set up e-junkie to add VAT to each product it works fine, it's just this issue with the VAT exempt products which throws a spanner in the whole thing.



One other little issue I have is that the cart displays the NET price and only adds and displays the VAT when a user adds postcode for shipping. Ideally, the cart would display the GROSS prices as the user does not need to see the VAT.



Many thanks in advance.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Shipping and Tax are calculated by our cart as their own, separate line-item amounts for the order as a whole; they are not calculated on individual items and then added up to produce lump-sum totals. Thus, can they cannot alter the price of each product, nor can VAT on shipping be exempted for any particular item.



You can of course disable the Sales Tax/VAT setting for any product which should not have its price factored into VAT calculation, but if you have configured our VAT settings to apply VAT to Shipping, that is calculated from the shipping total, so there is no way to exempt from VAT the portion of shipping charges contributed for any particular item. Are the shipping charges to deliver a VAT-exempt product also normally exempt from VAT?

[mrg]

So, basically 'Tax' is calculated on a single total cart figure, not per item. That right?



Regarding VAT exempt products, yes, shipping on these items are also exempt from VAT.



Finally, should I assume that the cart can only display the line item amounts and cannot combine the 'Tax' into the product prices?



Many thanks.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Yes, Tax is calculated against a single subtotal of the prices of all items in the cart which have Tax enabled. It is not currently possible to combine VAT into the prices of individual items in the cart rather than as a separate line-item, but we can put that request on the wishlist to see if it might be feasible. You could at least add a line of text to the cart explaining that Tax = VAT, using our cart customization technique:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.custom-cart.htm



It's interesting what you say about shipping services being exempt from VAT for VAT-exempt items, so we'll put that on the wishlist as well to see if there's any way we could feasibly accommodate that in the future.

[mrgee]

Great, and thanks for the info.