The AvaTax Sales Tax Automation add-on facilitates the following functions for your online store:
Address Validation
Your online store provides facilities for address validation in the customer storefront and Admin areas.
In the Customer area, address validation is done:
in the Address book of a customer user profile - when an address is saved or updated;
on the checkout page - when a customer clicks the Check address button.
If a customer chooses to place their order without clicking the Check address button first, their address is not validated.
In the Admin area, address validation is done only when the store administrator saves or updates an address in a customer’s Address book:
For address validation, an address validation call is made to AvaTax. AvaTax performs the data verification and returns results to the X-Cart store.
If AvaTax can resolve the input address data successfully, it returns a normalized address:
It spell-checks the original address and automatically corrects inaccurate street names.
It may update the postal code to provide more accuracy.
For example, a five-digit zip code may be replaced with a nine-digit code in the “Zip+4” format for addresses in the United States.
Suppose the address submitted for validation contains ambiguous data that AvaTax fails to resolve. In that case, it returns an error and displays a message indicating the problem at the top of the page in your online store. For example, the screenshot below demonstrates a message resulting from an attempt to validate an incorrect street address.
Sales Tax Calculation
Sales tax automation for orders at your X-Cart store falls back on Avalara’s extensive database of taxability data for different taxing jurisdictions. X-Cart’s AvaTax Sales Tax Automation add-on allows your store to connect to Avalara’s AvaTax engine to determine the taxing jurisdiction to which the sale transaction pertains based on the address data provided and have the appropriate product taxability rules applied to the products in the order.
The product taxability rules in the AvaTax system are associated with specific products in your X-Cart store via tax codes. Depending on your AvaTax subscription plan, you may be able to use hundreds of thousands of pre-defined AvaTax system tax codes or define your custom tax codes.
When your online store needs to perform the sales tax calculation, the add-on passes on to AvaTax all the information it requires for estimation. AvaTax uses this information to determine the necessary taxing jurisdiction and select the taxing rules to apply.
The sales tax calculation results for an order are provided directly on the checkout page before the order is placed.
Taxes at checkout are displayed not per item but for the whole order, including shipping charges. A customer sees the names of the taxes applied to the order.
The Avalara Transactions page displays total per-item taxation instead, which aggregates all tax costs applied to a product. The tax of the shipping line item follows the taxability of the shipped items.
Related pages: