AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

We are due to launch a new store within the next month or two that will sell primarily to distributors and vendors, most of which have tax exemption status. I can see that AbleCommerce has a place for managing tax exemption by placing users in a group and marking the group as tax exempt. However, the issue of obtaining and monitoring tax exemption certification raises concerns at our company where online ordering is a small part of our overall business. I did some research on the AvaTax gateway and found that they have a means of managing tax certifications which puts the ball in the customer's court. Even if we do that, we still have the issue of having a store administrator keep an eye on things, and getting first time customers set up with tax exempt status.

Is there a way we can avoid having to set up a customer in AbleCommerce as tax exempt BEFORE allowing them to make a tax-exempt purchase, such as a button in the checkout process that would allow them to provide their exemption details? And is this easy or difficult to do?

The only way to accomplish it would be to establish them as tax exempt prior to checkout.

If you try to do it within checkout, things are going to get confusing. Checkout doesn't take too well to altering the basket items or calculated totals while within the checkout page itself.

I would suggest a link on the first page of Checkout that redirects to a different page altogether when tax-exempt information can entered. Once entered, the Token.Instance.User can then be added to some sort of hard-coded Group that's assigned to be tax exempt. When all of that is done, redirect back to Checkout and all the math will work out.

What we did was let them checkout normally with tax charges. Then we refunded the tax and updated the invoice to show that tax was removed. Then we placed them in the tax exempt group so we wouldn't have to do it again for that customer. Kind of a pain but, we have always had this problem no matter what shopping cart we used. We thought about doing custom code but then we get into situations during upgrades. I like to try and stay as stock as possible with minor customizations.

frankenstein897 wrote:I like to try and stay as stock as possible with minor customizations.

Not a bad idea at all as long as your solution doesn't significantly impact your daily business life. I'm all for keeping things as stock as possible and I customize AbleCommerce for a living