Hi all,

I have a problem with configuring VM (1.1.18) to show GST properly for Australian shoppers and also to show no GST for international shoppers. I have researched the messy issue that is taxes and Virtuemart on the VM forums but are looking for inspiration or aspects I may have missed.

My client's goal is to display gross prices on its site with the tax component first showing at the Cart stage, but for this to switch to net price with zero GST for international shoppers once they have put in their intl shipping address.

My conclusions so far:

1. The first goal is met with VM configured as tax based on vendor address and the Show Included Tax checkbox off. However even with an intl shipping address VM still shows gross prices and tax amounts for international shoppers.

2. To achieve correct display and pricing for international shoppers is not straightforward - ideally it would use “tax based on shipping address” but this would require a shopper to be registered with a shipping address and logged in before the appropriate prices/tax could be shown and would also need a hack to the code to fix a problem in order to have the correct prices/tax shown throughout. See http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=87161.0.

3. I see four options:
a. Charge international shoppers the gross prices - not really acceptable to my client!
b. Advise via a message/article on the site that international shoppers either will be given an offsetting discount by being placed in an appropriate shopping group when they register and log in or can use an offsetting permanent Tax Exempt discount coupon – note the checkout and order will show both the discount and a tax amount (and the latter will be adjusted because it will be based on the discounted price) – not ideal!
c. Adopt the core hack approach (in VM forum post referenced above) combined with or without the requirement that prices are only displayed to logged in users with shipping addresses – without this latter requirement international shoppers I expect will see the gross prices and tax amounts until they reach the checkout step where they have entered their shipping address
d. Abandon VM

Can anybody offer any corrections to the above or better approaches?

I've generally only worked with just Australian market as target, but something I do with my sites may be helpful.

Rather than displaying tax seperately on orders, I have modified my template to show the tax as inclusive of GST.

So perhaps what you could do is put some PHP in the template where it works out the tax display code, and an if statement could decide for you which way to display the tax info for that customer based on shipping location or other factors. The tax itself should calculate on the shipping address once entered.

An untried theory btw - will need to come back to it when I finally have it as an international purchase issue.

Thanks Patrick.

I am trying to avoid hacks if possible for ongoing maintenance/upgrade reasons, but certainly this option is on the table.

The difficulty in wanting to display a price before the buyer enters a shipping address still would remain.

An additional option that I think I am likely to go for is to duplicate the products but without GST and put them in a separate international shoppers category. Messes up the automated inventory control, but with the CSVI extension, modifying the product imports file for different tax_id and category (and product_sku) should not be difficult. With this I then need to rely on user intelligence to choose the international shopper category if they are in fact international - a weakness I know to rely on intelligent user behaviour...

Hi,

maybe I can help you with this little video below which I record a few minutes ago.

Hello Eugen,
I just followed this faithfully with my site.
Thanks for trying. The problem with this approach is that typically a product is sold and advertised for $1.00 (including GST)
The net price might be say $0.91, gross price $0.99.
The Gross price is always used, this method appears to display The "Product Price (Net) only.
For my site it uses electronic downloads so shipping addresses will normally not be requested (indeed many shoppers might find this intrusive and irrelevant), all they want to do is purchase a PDF and download it. The default should be to include GST in all transactions.
I have read of a number of hacks to make this work

Option 1 documented here
forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=87161.0

Option 2 documented here
forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=70966.0

Option 3 documented here
forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=54517.0;topicseen

Of these the one by Das123 appears the best, beautifully documented but terrifying for a newbie.

Any chance that this will every become part of the core and configurable?

Hi,

sure - all this problems are solved in virtuemart 2.