1.5 Tax Settings

Introduction and Business Impact

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For US users to understand the exact price to pay for a product, merchants who target products in the US must submit the taxes they collect. If your merchants will be targeting the US, we recommend providing the ability to set this at the account level within your integration. Learn more about how tax settings work and when to use them.

For how to submit tax requirements for non US countries, learn more how to set the price of your products to meet the requirements.

Important: It is your merchant's responsibility to consult their tax advisor to ensure their setup meets their own legal requirements and to reflect accurate prices.

UX Guidance

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Here are examples of what you can build within your integration to help guide merchants to implement their taxes through your integration and redirect them to Merchant Center if needed.

Option #1. Guiding the merchant to use the destination based taxes through your integration

• Present the options with how they want to decide to set up their taxes. The merchant will be prompted to select either use destination-based tax rates or not use destination-based tax rates
• The merchant will select the destination based tax rate which will use the setup via the Content API
• Once selected, the merchant can click confirm and they will see a confirmation that their tax is set up.

The merchant will first see the account-level tax set up page: The merchant will be prompted to select either use destination-based tax rates or not use destination-based tax rates: Once selected, click confirm and you will see a confirmation that your tax is set up:

Option #2. Guiding the merchant to redirect them to Merchant Center for more complex setups.

Present the options with how they want to decide to set up their taxes. The merchant is prompted to select either use destination-based tax rates(that is, setup using the Content API) or not use destination-based tax rates which redirects them to Merchant Center. The merchant will then select not to use the destination based tax rate which will redirect them to Merchant Center. Once selected, the merchant can click confirm, they will see a message which warns them they need to complete this step in Merchant Center. We recommend adding this link which will direct them to their Merchant Center account to set up their taxes.

Tech Guidance

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There are a couple ways with deciding on how to approach building an integration for your merchants to meet our tax requirements:

• Account tax settings using the Content API: You can build the ability for your merchants to meet their US tax requirements at an account level. This is best for your integration if a majority of your merchants target the US.

• Direct merchants to Merchant Center: This option can be considered if the majority of your merchants do not target the US or if the merchants have a complex setup.

Account tax settings using the Content API

The Content API enables you to specify account tax using the content API endpoint accounttax services. Note the tax attribute, and therefore use of the accounttax service, is only applicable to products targeting the US. The accounttax Content API services mirror the functionality of the Merchant Center UI. This will leverage the Google estimated tax rates to be automatically applied.

If you want to be more precise, you can specify tax at a product level, this requires additional work to integrate this functionality.

Account tax settings - Implementing destination based tax rates

This setup is for merchants who have a simple setup where they operate from 1 state. To enable this we suggest setting the 1 state where the business operates. This can be pulled via the merchant’s address of business operations in your system. Ensuring the “useGlobalRate” tool is set to True to enable Google-determined sales tax.

Merchant Center Interface Example

API Call Example

Note: There is a possibility if a merchant uses this setup and they are flagged for incorrect taxes. They will need to fix this and learn more about how merchants can fix incorrect tax information.

Important: If there are existing tax settings set up within a Merchant Center account, the content API can overwrite these existing settings.

Directing merchants to Merchant Center

If you decide to leverage what we showed in the UX example and allow the ability for merchants to choose to implement the destination based tax rates, the other option for the merchants choose are:

• My store does not use destination tax settings

• I am not sure or have a more complex setup

For these options, we can direct merchants to their tax settings where they can set up their tax rates directly in Merchant Center. If you do not plan to build the account level tax setup within your integration, you should call out the tax requirement and direct merchants to Merchant Center to set up their tax settings.