Taxes

Why

On a first tought, shops need some knowledge about taxes to be able to display prices correctly. It may be required to display net or gross prices, this may depend on the customer.

It may also be required to do some tax calculations, this will at least be the case during the checkout process. Taxes may also have to be applied to shipment costs in some way and depend on the customer and the delivery location.

If one also wants to generate invoices from a shop, there might be also further requirements.

What to do in the core implementation

Maybe it is possible to find a simple solution to start with and try to be extendable:

  • Find a simple solution which is sufficient for simple shops. (?)
  • Try to do models in a way that most tax requirements can be solved by extended implementations.
  • Check which information is required to determine the tax rules to apply. This information should be made available to tax implementations.

What do others?

Try to not reinvent the wheel: Other shop systems / frameworks will contain solutions to this problem. But also ERP-Systems will contain solutions to this problem.

Maybe it is wise to have a look at projects like Tryton (http://tryton.org).

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