Regions & Taxes

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  Regions & taxes

When your store is first created, we set up some default shipping rates and taxes for your own country (and its provinces, states, or territories, if applicable). We do our best to keep the default tax rates up to date, but you should double check and make sure that they are correct yourself. You are solely responsible for submitting any taxes you collect.

If you want to be able to ship to other countries, you can add them here and they will have their own tax and shipping rates. It is generally the case that you would collect taxes for sales in your home country and leave taxation of foreign shipments to be taken care of by authorities at the destination.

Recommended Tax Settings

We try to offer you some guidance on how to configure your Tax settings based upon your country.

These recommendations are provided for you in the sidebar on the "Regions & Taxes" settings page.

Recommended Tax Settings for Australian Stores

If you are an Australian store, you will have to make a choice on how you deal with your Tax based upon your circumstances and whether or not you are registered for GST.

The current ATO guidelines state that you must register for GST if your GST turnover is greater than $75,000. Below that amount, you do not have to register if you don't want to.

Small Businesses that are not registered for GST

Many small home-based businesses choose not to register for GST as it involves additional paperwork and there is not much benefit to them in doing so.

In these cases, we recommend that you set your Country Tax Rate for Australia to 0.00%.

This means that no tax will be charged at all on all of the items that are purchased from your store.

Please note that we do not recommend using the "Tax Free" setting on each of your product variations. This setting is primarily used to specify items that are GST free such as some food items, and as such the items are specially marked as Tax Free on orders that are sent to your customers.

We do not recommend this approach because it means that you are sending out incorrect information to your customers (taxable items are marked as tax free, even though they aren't), and it also means that you must remember to add this setting to every new product that you add to your store. It's much simpler to just set your tax rate to 0.00%.

Larger Businesses that are registered for GST

If you are registered for GST, then just leave your Country Tax Rate for Australia set to 10%, and GST will be correctly calculated for all orders.

You may also set the Tax Free flag for any items in your inventory that do not attract GST, such as some food items.

Additional Tax Settings for Australia

There are three additional settings that you need to configure for your Tax settings. These will apply regardless of whether or not you are registered for GST or not. If you are not registered, then these settings will just be ignored, but it's easier and safer to keep them set correctly in case you do need to register for GST in the future.

• All taxes are included in my product's prices
  Yes - GST is included in all prices and the published price must always include GST.
  
  
• Charge taxes on domestic shipping rates
  Yes - GST is included in domestic shipping rates.
  
  
• Charge taxes on export shipping rates
  No - Generally GST is not included for international postage rates. If you use a different shipping method, then you should change this setting according to whether you are being charged GST.