Managing sales tax is a thankless task for any business. You won’t get props for collecting the correct sales tax from a customer, or for filing returns and remitting tax properly and on time, but you’ll sure catch hell and be penalized for getting it wrong.

While sales tax requirements are never considered easy, they’re particularly difficult in the following 10 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Tennessee, and Texas. Another two deserve honorable mention: Alabama and Kansas.

The complexity of sales tax collection, remittance, and returns in the above states creates a perfect storm that makes sales and use tax filing in these jurisdictions uncommonly painful. Contributing factors include:

• Home rule
• Non-traditional sales tax
• Sales tax holidays

Want to spend more time managing your WooCommerce store, and overseeing day-to-day business, than handling taxes? The road to compliance need not be paved with bumps and setbacks. It can be as simple as syncing WooCommerce with a software solution and automating the sales tax collection process.

Before thinking about automation, you need to understand the basics. Thankfully, Internet sales tax is just a pass-through tax exchanged between seller and state. You’re not on the hook for paying anything out of your own pocket. You are, however, responsible for collecting the right amount, in the right state, and remitting in a timely manner.

The US Supreme Court decided this week that each state can now require sales tax to be collected on internet sales. This ruling opens the door for states to do something that they haven’t been able to before: tax a lot of internet sales.

While WooCommerce can’t advise you on which taxes your business needs — that’s a question for your accountant — you can configure settings in WooCommerce to either manually or automatically calculate taxes based on the requirements of the new rules.

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As an online seller, chances are you buy the products you sell from a wholesaler or other supplier. Or, if you’re a crafter or manufacturer, you most likely buy the component parts of your products somewhere.

The good news is that, in the U.S., you can buy products or component parts you intend to use for resale without paying sales tax. You can do this by presenting a resale certificate – also known as a “reseller’s permit” or, more broadly, an “exemption certificate” – to your vendor.

The slightly less good news is U.S. sales tax is governed at the state level, and that means rules and laws on using resale certificates vary from state to state. However, there are some general rules of thumb when it comes to using resale certificates, and we pulled together state-by-state guides to using resale certificates in the 45 U.S. states and Washington D.C. that have a sales tax.

Let’s dig in!

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You’re a WooCommerce store developer with a lot on your plate. The last thing you need are sales tax questions or omissions – an often-forgotten but vital aspect of a website throwing off your development timeline. That’s why we put together the last cheat sheet you’ll ever need for helping clients set up sales tax on their online store.

5 Sales Tax Questions to Ask Clients

There are five essential questions to ask clients before setting up sales tax collection in their WooCommerce store. We’ll go over each one and why you need to know the answer to best provide a full-service sales tax setup.

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Today’s post comes to us from Jennifer Sokolowsky at Avalara. AvaTax for WooCommerce is a seamless integration for Avalara’s tax calculation services. Automatically calculate tax rates, submit documents to Avalara for transactions, and enable address validation at checkout for supported countries. Give it a try today to get tax right no matter where you’re selling.

International markets can offer big opportunities for store owners. Selling across borders can offer growth potential when local sales have plateaued, as well as a way to get an edge on competitors. It can also offer a way to diversify your business.

However, selling internationally can be more complicated than doing business domestically. One of the major considerations to keep in mind is how to deal with taxes — specifically VAT.

Here’s what you should know about the value added tax (or VAT), when and where it applies, and how you can make sure you get VAT right when you begin selling internationally.

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Missed our Sales Tax 101 webinar with TaxJar? Not to worry: we’ve collected your most pressing questions about collecting and managing sales tax into this FAQ, plus made the slides available for download (for free!). Have a look…

Over the course of the last few weeks, we’ve been lucky enough to work with the folks at TaxJar on a webinar about sales tax for store owners. It’s been an eye-opening experience, to say the least, even for those of us with experience managing an eCommerce store. Who knew tax could be so complex?

We’ve been keeping an eye out for the most commonly asked questions about sales tax, and now we’ve compiled them all into one spot. This post will give you quick rundown of what you should know about state sales tax, plus links to resources where you can learn more.

If you’re new to tax in your online store or just have a few questions about your situation, read on to have all your pressing questions answered — and to get a free download of the webinar slide deck.

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Humans like things that are simple. And I think store owners like simplicity best of all. You like to check items off your checklists, or archive them in your project management apps, secure in the knowledge that you’ve dealt with them and can move on.

I talk to a lot of store owners based in the US, and have noticed a few common reactions to the not-at-all-simple task that is dealing with state sales tax. Most opt for the “do it yourself” method. This works great until the business starts to grow and thrive. Then sales tax becomes a time-consuming nightmare that doesn’t fit neatly into a to do list.

Others go all out and hire a sales tax accountant to take care of everything for them. This is expensive, and is also often overkill. There’s also the “bury your head in the sand” method — ignore it and hope it goes away. That just a bad idea all around.

My philosophy is that, with the right combination of education and sales tax automation, store owners can make short work of their sales tax burdens. You can start on the education aspect of this by giving yourself a yearly tax checkup.

Let’s get started on your yearly tax checkup. But first, I’ll explain why this all seems so complex.

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So you get that as an eCommerce store owner, you need to be sales tax compliant. This means that in the United States specifically, you have to charge sales tax to buyers in states where you have nexus. All states have a slightly different definition of nexus, but most of the time states consider that a “physical presence” or “economic connection”, based on sales into that state, creates nexus.

Even after you have done the research to understand where you have nexus, then how much do you charge? Does it vary from customer to customer? And why does this have to be so complicated?

And more importantly, is there a solution that can automate everything so WooCommerce customers don’t have to deal with any of this? The good news is, yes there is!

First, we’ll explain a bit about how sales tax works, and then we’ll show you how you can use TaxJar to automate the entire process so you never have to stress about sales tax again.

While determining the right rates to charge can be tricky, a little reading will help you wrap your head around it in no time. Today, we’ll explain the different sales tax rates in the United States, and help you figure out which rates to charge your customers.

If you’re a growing eCommerce business with multiple sales channels (WooCommerce, Amazon, Walmart, etc.), and want to take advantage of fully automated sales tax and filing services, we recommend you choose TaxJar.

Let’s get started.

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When I talk to store owners, the reasons they give me for starting their businesses are as varied as their personalities. They seek the freedom of self-employment, control of the future, a legacy to leave family, or a way to get their awesome products out there to the masses.

One thing that never makes that list is dealing with administrative hassles like sales tax. No one wants to deal with that.

Collecting, reporting, and filing sales tax returns is one of the less fun sides of selling products online. If you don’t have a handle on sales tax, it can be a confusing mess every time a filing deadline rolls up. But it doesn’t have to be!

This introduction to sales tax for WooCommerce store owners will explain all the basics you need to know. It will walk you through the five steps of sales tax compliance for sellers based in the United States, and give you some things to think about before you reach your first tax deadline.

Let’s dig in.

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You may (or may not) have heard by now that the EU are introducing new rules surrounding VAT on digital goods from the 1st Jan 2015. We’ve been aware of these changes for a while now and have been working on some solutions in order to make these changes a little easier to handle. If you’ve not heard about these new rules, this sums them up:

On 1 January 2015 the VAT rules for cross-border B2C supplies of ‘digital services’ (i.e. broadcasting, telecoms and e-services) will change. From that date, VAT must be accounted for in the member state where the customer normally lives, rather than where the supplier of the service is established. – HMRC, Brief 46

And as John McCarthy, CEO of Taxamo puts it, “These new rules flip EU VAT on its head”.

The new EU VAT rules on the supply of digital services affect all companies (EU and non-EU) that sell to consumers inside the EU.

To be compliant you’ll need to do the following:

• Charge the correct country VAT rates based on customer’s location.
• Validate the customer’s location and ensure there are 2 pieces of non-conflicting evidence stored (e.g. a billing address and a matching IP Address).
• Report your VAT to each EU state, or use a MOSS (Mini-One-Stop-Shop) which reports to each EU state on your behalf.

To help you become compliant, we’ve developed a Taxamo extension to integrate with their service, and also updated our EU VAT Numbers extension.

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We couldn’t wait any longer for our usual Thursday drop, especially seeing we’ve been quiet on  the WooCommerce front the last few weeks with Mike and Jay coding up an absolute storm in their bunker in the UK! With that said we are HUGELY excited about today’s release of WooCommerce 1.4!

Version 1.4 is perhaps not a massively exciting release for the end-user, but for developers it’s a biggy. We’ve re-written large chunks of code, made all round refinements to the plugin for our plans going forward, and optimised performance levels. Of course we’ve added some more bells and whistles too, but a lot of the changes are under the hood.

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