WooCommerce Tax

With the WooCommerce Tax plugin, you can enable automated tax rates for your store. You won’t need to manually enter tax rates for every city, postcode, state, or country. WooCommerce Tax will charge your customers the appropriate tax rates at checkout automatically, freeing up your time to run all the other aspects of your business.

1. Install the WooCommerce Tax plugin.
   • Logged into your site, head to Plugins > Add New and search for WooCommerce Tax.
   • Select Install Now and Activate when prompted to do so.
2. Connect your site to WordPress.com.
   • Follow the prompt to connect your site to your WordPress.com account. This is the same account used on WooCommerce.com.
   • You’ll then be directed back to your site, and a Setup complete banner will show.

This documentation will cover the automated tax rate functionality of the WooCommerce Tax extension. If you want more details around setting up taxes in general in WooCommerce, please see the Setting up Taxes in WooCommerce documentation.

To start using the automated tax rate feature in WooCommerce Tax, first be sure that the “Enable taxes and tax calculations” option is checked in your settings under WooCommerce > Settings > General.

With taxes enabled, next head to WooCommerce > Settings > Tax, and there you can select “Enable automated taxes” and Save Changes.

Once Automated taxes are enabled, you’ll notice many of the tax options are disabled. Automated taxes will overide these below options from the WooCommerce core tax settings.

• Prices entered with tax will be set to “No, I will enter prices exclusive of tax.”
• Calculate tax based on will be set to “Customer shipping address.”
• Shipping tax class will be set to the “Standard.”
• Rounding will be disabled
• Display prices in the shop will be set to “Excluding tax”
• Display prices during cart and checkout will be set to “Excluding tax.”
• Display tax totals will be set to “As a single total.”

When Automated taxes are in enabled, this will adjust any tax rates you had manually added for locations where you have a tax nexus, as well as the “Compound” and “Shipping” toggles for those tax rates.

After switching to automated rates, a backup of your previous tax rates is created and can be found at WooCommerce > Status > WooCommerce Tax.

If your store is based in the EU, we also recommend using our EU VAT Number extension in addition to the automated taxes from WooCommerce Tax.

To diagnose issues with your WooCommerce Shipping & Tax setup we’d recommend enabling logging and/or debugging. To see those options head to WooCommerce > Status > WooCommerce Tax.

The system status page displays issues that could cause WooCommerce Shipping & Tax to stop functioning and contains helpful debug information, plus links to get further assistance.

The most recent tax requests can be seen under the Taxes Log section. Older requests can be viewed by going to WooCommerce > Status > Logs.

Even if the tax value for an order is 0.00, Automated Taxes may be working correctly.

For instance, if your store is based in the United States, you only need to collect sales tax from customers in locations where you have a tax nexus, which typically means a physical presence. WooCommerce Tax uses your store address that is under WooCommerce > Settings > General as your “tax nexus”.

You can also have a tax nexus in another state if you exceed a certain yearly dollar value or order total to another state. If you are unsure of your tax nexus status, please consult a certified local accountant.

If you need to charge tax for any other state, you can add a tax rate for that state in addition to using automated taxes to charge customers from that state tax as well. For more information about your States Tax Nexus and Destination Tax rules, please have a look at: State-by-state guide to economic nexus laws.

According to the Florida Department of Revenue, sales tax must be charged on shipping costs if the customer does not have an option to avoid paying the merchant for shipping costs by either picking up the merchandise themselves or arranging for a third party to pick up the merchandise and deliver it to them.

For merchants with a store address in Florida, we have enabled shipping tax for Florida by default. If you would like to disable this, you can do so via the below filter.

add_filter('woocommerce_taxjar_enable_florida_shipping_tax', '__return_false');

If for some reason you need to change your store address to another state, it is important that you check the settings you are using.

WooCommerce Tax uses your store address (WooCommerce > Settings > General), so it is important that you use this setting to add the new address where your store will be located. You will also need to delete all information that you added to the Standard tax rates (WooCommerce > Settings > Taxes > Standard rates tab). When using the automated rate rates, you’ll want to remove those standard rates to reset the plugin to your new location.

01-10-2018 @ 14:09:18 - Received (401): {"statusCode":401,"error":"Unauthorized","message":"Invalid token","attributes":{"error":"Invalid token"}}
01-10-2018 @ 14:09:21 - wcc_server_error_response Error: The WooCommerce Shipping & Tax server returned: Unauthorized Invalid token ( 401 ) (fetch_service_schemas_from_connect_server)

Reset the connection to WordPress.com by following this guide from our WooPayments documentation as the process is the same.

Do you still have questions and need assistance? 

• Get in touch with a Happiness Engineer via our Help Desk. We provide support for extensions developed by and/or sold on WooCommerce.com, and Jetpack/WordPress.com customers.
• If you are not a customer, we recommend finding help on the WooCommerce Support Forum or hiring a WooExpert agency. They are trusted agencies with a proven track record of building highly customized, scalable online stores. Learn more about WooExpert agencies.