SureCart helps you adjust how much tax you pay for different types of products and for shipping, so you follow the rules about taxes where you run your business. Certain products may have different tax rate requirements based on your tax jurisdiction.
For example, let’s say you sell both outdoor and indoor clothes. If your region charges less tax for outdoor clothes because they’re considered essential, you can group them together and pay the lower tax rate.
Similarly, if there are different tax requirements for shipping costs, SureCart allows you to apply the correct tax rate and exemptions to shipping, aligning with legal standards and avoiding any legal complications.
This article shows you how you can easily enable overriding product and shipping tax charges with SureCart.
Enabling Taxes In SureCart
To enable tax overriding, you first need to enable taxes for your online store. If you haven’t done that already, here’s how you can do it.
Enable Taxes from the SureCart Settings
Begin by enabling the following tax option in your SureCart settings.
- Navigate to SureCart Settings > Taxes and enable the Tax Collection option.
- Enter your address details here and click Save.
Note: Filling in your address is important for the next steps. If you face any errors while filling in your address details, please contact us.
Enabling Taxes for Individual Products
Now that you’ve enabled taxes for your online store, it’s time to make sure that it’s enabled for individual products as well.
- Navigate to Products and select the product you want.
- Ensure that the Charge tax on this product option is enabled.
For more details on these tax options, check our article on configuring tax settings in SureCart.
Creating Product Collections
SureCart allows you to override taxes for a collection of products. For example, if you run a clothing store, you might have product collections such as Men’s Clothes, Women’s Apparel, etc.
This will let you override taxes for an entire category of products simultaneously.
If you want to override taxes for just one particular product, you can still create a collection with only that product.
If you haven’t set up a product collection yet, follow these steps to create one in SureCart:
- Navigate to Products > Collections > Add New to create a new product collection. In this example, let’s name the collection “Men’s Clothes”.
- Head to any individual product via Products and click on the Add to Collection button. Select the collection in which you want to add this product.
The product has now been added to the collection we created.
How to Override Taxes for Products In SureCart
Once you’ve enabled taxes and created product collections, you can override the taxes for them. Here’s how you can do it:
- Navigate to Settings > Taxes again and select your desired region. For this example, let’s choose Australia.
- Enable the Collect Tax option for your business.
- Select the same country and enter your tax number on this popup screen, tax charges will be automatically calculated for you. Click on the Collect Tax button once you’re done.
- Head to the Product Overrides section and click on the Add Override button.
- Select the collection of products that you want to override. We are going to be selecting the example collection “Men’s Clothes” we just created, but you can choose any collection you want.
- Enter the individual product’s tax rate and click on the Add Override button.
Now, all products in this collection will have a tax rate of 15% for the Australian region. Let’s preview these changes on our website.
Previewing Your Changes
Now, when an Australian customer attempts to purchase any product from this collection, they will see a different tax rate specifically applied to that product.
Compare this to any other product outside of the collection and you’ll notice the difference. This product will have the usual Australian tax rate that is automatically calculated according to the country.
You can follow this same process for any region you want.
Now that we have changed the taxes for product collections, let’s do the same for shipping charges..
How to Override Shipping Taxes in SureCart
To override shipping charges, you need to Enable Shipping Rates, create a shipping profile, and configure its shipping zones and rates.
You can find these options under Settings > Shipping.
Note: SureCart lets you ship products with the General profile by default. If you want to create new profiles, upgrade to any one of our premium plans.
Once you’ve configured your shipping profile, follow these steps:
- Make sure to enable the Physical Product options for individual products you intend to ship.
- Navigate to Settings > Taxes and select your desired region.
- Ensure that you’ve enabled the Collect Tax option.
- Click on the Add Override button within the “Shipping Overrides” area.
- Enter your shipping charges here and click on the Add Override button.
Now all of the physical products in the above country will have these custom shipping charges applied to them. You can preview the same on your website as well.
That’s it with this guide. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our support team at support@surecart.com. We’re always here to help!
