Shipping & Tax | Tips and Tricks WP eCommerce

WP eStore Shipping Variation

This post explains how you can configure a shipping variation for your products when using the WP eStore plugin.

The shipping variation can be very useful if you want to charge different shipping amount to your customers based on their selection.

The “Shipping Variation Option” field located in the settings menu of eStore can be used when you need to adjust the shipping price based on a selection the customer makes. Say for example, you have configured all the products with shipping price that covers domestic shipping. Now, you want to charge $10 extra for shipping items to Canada and $15 extra for shipping items to any other country. Enter the following text in the “Shipping Variation Option” field and save the settings.
Country|USA|Canada:10|Other:15
This will give the customers an option in the shopping cart that will let them select the destination. If they are located in the US (domestic shipping) then no extra shipping will be charged but if they are from Canada or other county then the appropriate amount will be added to the shipping cost:

Shopping Cart with Shipping Variation Option

What to do if I do not want to charge an individual shipping for an item but want to use the shipping variation?

Simply enter “0.001” in the shipping field of the individual item. The value “0.001” is very small so it will not add any individual item shipping but will trigger the display of the shipping variation as the shopping cart will treat this item as a physical product.

When to use the “Always Display Shipping Variation” field?

By default the shipping variation is only displayed if any of the items in the shopping cart has a shipping value specified. This is so the shipping variation does not get displayed to customers buying digital products only.

If you are only selling physical products then you can check this option and the shipping variation will be displayed to the customer all the time even though you haven’t specified a shipping value in the items.

WP eStore Tax Calculation

Charging sales tax for your products when using WP eStore plugin to sell your product(s) is very easy. There are a few ways you can use the tax feature of eStore:

Use the built-in tax feature of eStore.
Use the PayPal’s profile based tax feature.
Use the table rate tax addon.
Use the TaxCloud integration.

Using the Built-in Tax Feature of eStore

Simply enable the tax calculation option from the settings menu and specify the tax rate for your store and that’s it.

WP eStore Tax Settings

Sometimes you maybe selling product(s) where sales tax is not applicable or you may want to charge a different tax rate for a particular item. With eStore you can achieve that by overriding the tax rate for a particular product from the individual product’s tax option:

Overriding Sales Tax for an Individual Product

The sales tax is displayed in the shopping cart when the tax feature is enabled (the following is an example screenshot of the shopping cart with tax feature enabled)

WP eStore Cart Screenshot

Using the PayPal Profile Based Tax Feature

Please see the how to use regional or international sales tax when selling via PayPal post for this option.

WP eStore Table Rate Tax

Table rate tax allows you to charge tax in the shopping cart based on the customer’s country. See the table rate tax addon page for details.

Table Rate Tax by Item Type

The Table Rate Tax by Item Types addon allows you to charge tax in the shopping cart based on the user’s country and type of items they are purchasing.

Using TaxCloud Integration

WP eStore has an integration with TaxCloud, a free sales tax management service, to automatically calculate tax for every address in the United States.

View the eStore TaxCloud addon page to get more details on this integration.

How Shipping Address is Collected from the Customer

As the shop admin, you will need the shipping address of the customer to ship physical products but know that you don’t have to do anything special. PayPal handles the shipping address collection and will email you with postage information after a payment so you can ship the product.

Triggering Shipping Address Collection for Digital Items

If you are selling physical products (with a shipping fee) then it will trigger a shipping address collection during the checkout process.

By default, WP eStore plugin doesn’t trigger the shipping address collection for digital products as it’s an unnecessary step that we can skip to speed up the checkout process. If you have a product that is not really a physical product but you still want to collect shipping/mailing address, do the following to trigger address collection during checkout.

Step 1) Edit the product in question and uncheck the “Downloadable” checkbox.

Step 2) Add a value of 0.001 in the “Item Shipping Cost” field. This will make it so it doesn’t charge a shipping amount but it will trigger hte address collection.

This is how it works:

A customer clicks on the Pay Now/Checkout button and goes to PayPal to pay for the product or service.
The customer fills in the credit card details or logs into his/her PayPal account and reviews the order.
Now before hitting the “Pay Now” button the customer can use the default shipping address (taken from his/her PayPal account) or specify a different shipping address by clicking on “Change Shipping” that is shown below the default shipping address.
After payment, PayPal will send you a payment confirmation email which will have this postal address so you can ship the item.
The plugin will also capture the address in the “Cart Orders” menu inside your WordPress admin dashboard.

Shipping Address Collection When Paying from PayPal account

Shipping Address Collection When Paying using a Credit Card

Alternative Option

The other option is to drop a shipping address collection form similar to the one shown in the following screenshot on the “Thank You” page. This way when the customers get redirected to the “Thank You” page after paying on PayPal, they can enter their shipping address. The content of the form (the address in this case) is mailed to you when the customer hits the submit button.

It is really easy to add a form similar to the one shown above using a WordPress contact form plugin. I use the Contact Form 7 plugin which allows you to add a customized form on any page to collect info from visitors.

How to Use/Configure Sales Tax (Regional or International) When Selling Through PayPal

Please see the WP eStore Tax Calculation article to learn more on eStore’s built-in tax feature.

Configuring sales tax (regional or international) when selling through PayPal is really easy if you want to use it. After you configure the sales tax, PayPal will automatically charge customers the appropriate amount when they pay for your products or services on PayPal.

Configure Sales Tax in PayPal

There is a video tutorial on how to setup regional sales tax in PayPal.

PayPal frequently updates their interface so the following screenshot may not exactly match with what you see in your profile but the general concept is the same.

Log in to your PayPal account by visiting www.paypal.com.
Go to ‘Profile’ from ‘My Account’ (My Account->Profile)

paypal-sales-tax-calculation-settings-4441

Click on the ‘Regional Tax’ link and you will get the following screen

paypal-sales-tax-calculation-settings-page2-444

Now you can add regional or/and internation sales tax in this screen.

After you configure the sales tax when a customer goes to pay for a product by clicking the ‘Checkout’ button of the WP eStore shopping cart plugin, PayPal will automatically charge the customer the appropriate tax.

If you do not wish to charge tax for a particular item (for example: a digital item) then set the individual item tax of that item to 0 (zero) and it will not charge any sales tax on that item. You can set the individual tax of a product from under the Shipping and Tax section of that product.

Please note that sales tax will be applied to the shopping cart after the customer fills in the credit card details (if paying by card) or logs into his/her PayPal account (if paying from paypal account). This is so paypal can work out the appropriate tax amount based on the customer’s location.

How the Shipping Cost Calculation Works in WordPress eStore

WP eStore’s main strength is selling of digital product so we do not offer complex shipping options in the eStore plugin in an effort to keep the plugin easy to use and lightweight. Please feel free to read the available shipping options in eStore from this page so you can determine if it will meet your shipping needs.

1. Simple Shipping Option

If you just want to use flat shipping cost for each item then just enter “0” in the Base Shipping Cost option in the settings menu and add the individual shipping cost in the “Item Shipping Cost” field when you configure the product.

If you just want to use a fixed shipping cost for the cart no matter how many items are in the cart then you can achieve this by specifying this fixed amount in the base shipping cost. Remember, the base shipping cost is only added to the cart if a product in the cart has individual shipping value specified (this way if a customer buys digital product he doesn’t get charged any shipping). Use an individual shipping value of “0.001” for your physical items which won’t increase the shipping cost but will trigger the base shipping cost to be added as a fixed shipping rate.

2. Using PayPal’s Profile Based Shipping

You can have PayPal calculate shipping charges automatically. PayPal calculates shipping charges based on rates that you specify in your account profile. You can set up shipping rates as follows:

Domestic (U.S.-only) shipping rates for regions defined by state or zip code
International shipping rates for regions define by country or jurisdiction

You can specify shipping rate based on the weight of the items too. Within shipping regions, you can specify rates for different shipping methods, such as standard and express delivery.

We have a tutorial on how to setup paypal profile based shipping that you can look at if you have never configured profile based shipping before.

To use PayPal’s profile based shipping simply check the “Use PayPal Profile Based Shipping” checkbox in the settings menu of eStore and the shopping cart will use the shipping options you have specified in your PayPal account profile:

PayPal’s profile based shipping

If you use PayPal’s profile based shipping, your customers will be prompted to enter the shipping destination when they go to checkout via PayPal.

Choose destination for shipping calculation

After the customer enter the destination it will automatically add the shipping amount based on what you have specified in your profile (eg. based on the weight of item and or delivery location).

Shipping is calculated based on the specified criteria in your profile

ecommerce-shipping

3. How to Give Shipping Discount when Someone Buys Multiple Products

What if you want to use the simple shipping option but be a little more intelligent with the shipping cost calculation and want to use Base Shipping Cost in conjunction with the individual product shipping cost to offer your customers a better shipping price? You can do that too.

The base shipping cost is added to the total of the individual products shipping cost (The base shipping cost is only applied to the cart if any of the cart item has an individual shipping amount specified for it). So for example if you had two products that costs $50 each and you want to charge $10 shipping for each item then someone buying both the products would have to pay $100(product cost) + $20(shipping cost) = $120(total). That is not a very realistic shipping price since you are shipping both the products to the same address in one package so it will probably cost you $15 instead of $20.

How do you handle this situation?
You use a base shipping cost of $5 and individual product shipping cost of $5.

Now when someone buys both the products the shipping cost will be calculated as following:
$5(shipping for product1) + $5(shipping for product2) = $10(total individual products shipping cost)
Total shipping cost = $10(total individual products shipping cost) + $5(base shipping cost) = $15!

When someone buys one product the shipping cost will be calculated as following:
$5(shipping for product1) = $5(total individual products shipping cost)
Total shipping cost = $5(total individual products shipping cost) + $5(base shipping cost) = $10! (this is the shipping you wanted to charge for one product)

So, hopefully you can see that using the base shipping cost in conjunction with the individual product shipping cost you can be very dynamic in determining the total shipping cost for a purchase.

4. Using A Shipping Variation Option

You can use the shipping variation option field to add more shipping options for your need. For example, you can add a variation called Shipping with the values “Domestic” and “International” that adds different amount to the cart based on the user selection.

Please refer to the WP eStore Shipping Variation documentation to learn how to use variations.

5. Using Bulk Quantity Shipping Discount

Check the bulk quantity shipping discount addon for details.

6. UsingÂ Amount Based Shipping

The Amount Based Shipping addon allows you to automatically apply a shipping amount to the cart based on a price range.