Simplifying the impact of Sales Tax on the cart

[speakmoreclearly]

When I turn on sales tax, the shopping cart requires users to specify their country and zip code. This adds quite an impact to completing the transaction because the country list is very long.



I think this could easily be streamlined by:

1. Only asking for the ZIP if this is used in the sales tax calculation.

2. In the country list, only show countries for which I calculate sales tax.



In my case, I'm only charging sales tax in Australia and I don't need a Zip code, so I'd like to have the cart require the use to select from "Australia" or "Other". This could be a pull down or better a radio button.

[E-junkie_Monster]

Our Development staff would be glad to add your requests to the Wishlist, for consideration among other candidates as possible future enhancements to our existing system.



However, bear in mind that because ours is a centrally-managed system that is shared in common among the thousands of merchants subscribed to use our system, it is not possible to make a custom modification at just one merchant's request which would not also apply the very same modification to every other merchant as well, so we have to consider such requests within the context of our existing, overall development strategy.



In the meantime it is possible to at least trim down the country list by narrowing down the countries that you are willing to ship to/expect to receive orders from. On the first page under Seller Admin > Edit E-junkie Cart Shipping Settings you can CTRL+CLICK to select countries that you will ship to from the list of all available countries.

[speakmoreclearly]

Thanks for suggesting this, is an interesting idea. Since I only sell downloads, if I eliminate most countries, will this stop people from other countries?



I've just tried this and it and it is better. I still need to put in a Zip code and I really only want to have the country choices of "Australia" and "Other".

[E-junkie_Guru]

Since we have no way of detecting where a buyer is located without asking them, our Shipping Destination list can really only limit buyer countries for products which have Shipping enabled, but even then they could just lie about their location if they don't see their country listed and don't expect to have anything actually shipped to their real location.



If you are using PayPal, I think you can block buyer countries in your account settings at PayPal's end, and that would be more effective since they base that on the country given in each buyer's PayPal account profile. Then you could just disable Shipping-related settings at our end if you aren't actually shipping anything tangible.

[speakmoreclearly]

Umm... I don't want to block people from buying my products, I just need to comply with sales tax (GST) collection. I want to do this in a way that has minimal impact on order processing.



In my case I only need to know if they are purchasing from Australia, so ideally I'd want a radio button



O Australia O Other

[E-junkie_Guru]

Hm, we don't really have any way to make that possible, but you can at least make Australia the default country selected in the cart, which you can set in Seller Admin > Account Preferences. :^)

[speakmoreclearly]

Yes, I thought that. They the problem is if people don't change this they will get charged GST.



My major concerns with all this is:

1. Being compliant with Sales Tax law

2. Making htis as streamlined as possible to minimise the abandonment rate.



BTW, thanks for all the feedback and discussion and I hope your dev team give some thought to this as minimising cart the abandonment rate is critical.

[E-junkie_Guru]

You could add a note to your cart pointing out that buyers in Australia will be charged X% GST, maybe also suggest buyers in the rest of the world should select their country to avoid being charged that tax, or just let them figure that out for themselves.



This is the customization code you would need to add to your View Cart code on every page, just before the "// -->" line in the standard code we issue:



function EJEJC_config() {

EJEJC_POSTCALL=true;

}

function EJEJC_shown() {

jQuery("#tdPmnt").attr("innerHTML",

"Buyers in <b>Australia</b> will be charged <b>X% Goods and Services Tax</b>");

}



If you are already customizing your cart with function EJEJC_config(){} or EJEJC_shown(){}, just add any new lines above which are missing from your site's existing View Cart code.