E-Commerce and Paypal

[Harmonic]

I have done 2 previous e-commerce sites before, and they were pretty simple. They were only selling items within ontario, so the tax was the same for all items and so was shipping.

I have a client who after weeks of talking, now tells me the tax price of the item will change depending on what province or state the customer is buying from, and of course the shipping will change as well.

I know that UPS and such have an integration system for shipping prices, but i'm more worried about the taxes.

Is there a way to change the tax price in paypal depending on the shipping address? The client has payed in advance and is working with a limited budget, so I need to avoid time consuming and expensive solutions.

The client will also only be selling around 6-10 items online. Any ideas? Thanks!

[TheGAME1264]

None that I've ever found.

You're better off collecting the billing/shipping address from the site, allowing the user to pick a shipping option from the shipper of choice, and then passing the user to PayPal for payment.

[Harmonic]

What about the different taxes though? I'm not too worried about shipping, its the tax calculation

[LeenkzMike]

Any good commerce script should allow for different taxation, what you using?

Paypal shouldn't have anything to do with the tax, your cart should pass that on to paypal.

[TheGAME1264]

What country/state/province is this guy in, Harmonic? If it's Ontario, I usually just create a variable in an include file called HST, set the percentage, have a second one for the descriptor and adjust if/when it adjusts. If it's a non-Canadian customer, HST is set to 0.

Mind you, that's just how I do it. I've never been crazy about letting a cart do it for me because none of them handle Canadian sales taxes particularly well.

[Harmonic]

I've wrote my own little script, nothing to fancy. Which turns out now is the problem. I don't want to have to input each province/state/territory/county/country . This is why I was hoping PayPal could add the additional tax based on shipping address.

What cart would you recommend Mike? The site is in WordPress (customer's request), and located in Ontario. I know there are some free e-commerce plugins for WordPress, but can they do what I want?

[LeenkzMike]

Hi Harmonic,

OSCommerce will do it but, for as popular as it is, I find it very hard to master. I absolutely love opencart, it is a British project, but works great.

[AlphaMare]

I've only just started on an e-commerce site - just for me, to try to learn how to do it. I am using OpenCart for now, but I hope to study it enough to at least start making my own mods soon.
With OpenCart you can not only set the tax rate for each country, etc, but you can auto-calculate the exchange rate. The main thing that gives me pause is the (frequent) warnings from TheGame about how vulnerable any open-source-based site can be. But since I am only doing this as a development project and not a real online store, that doesn't bother me too much right now.

I know your client wants this done in WordPress, but I don't know of a plugin that will do all that.

Wish I could be of more help.

Good luck,

[TheGAME1264]

Since I work in Access/SQL server, I have some prepopulated tables that I use.

[Wesley]

You need a full-featured eCommerce system like Zen Cart, osCommerce, or Magento. Then use PayPal, Google Checkout, or Authorize.net for payment processing