Charging different excise taxes based on province of customer

[riri1983]

I'm in Canada, selling to Canadians, and the products I sell on my site are subject to an excise tax that differ from province to province (Tobacco). So, in addition to Federal and Sales taxes, there is an additional tax on each product that is dependent on the province that the consumer is in/shipping to. (FYI  the pre-tax product prices are all the same; it's just the additional taxes that differ, based on where in the country the customer is.)

So, how do I set up variable taxes by location, if that location is a province and not a country?

In a perfect world I'd have customers create a profile from a 3rd party app that includes their province of residence, which then determines the full price they are subject to. 

[Victor]

Hi @riri1983,

Thanks for reaching out. Shopify doesn't support in-built excise taxes for tobacco products in Canada, although you can work around this by using tax overrides. You can set an override for each province that is the total of the provincial tax and excise tax to ensure that customers are charged the correct amount when checking out. 

[riri1983]

HI Victor, 

Thanks so much for getting back to me. 

Question, I'm assuming the override allows me to set a flat rate for each province. Am I able to get more granular and set a rate by product-by-province? The reason I ask is that the excise rate is not a flat % of cost. Instead it's determined by grams of tobacco in the product.

So, say you are in Alberta and you buy two products; one light, one not so light. Those products are taxed at a different rate. 

How might I navigate that?

[Shay]

You bet! You can set overrides on collections of products, so you can separate the products into matching collections and then set the tax rates based on the products and for the location. 

Our Help Center document that Victor linked has some more details about this.

[riri1983]

That's great. Thank you so much, to both of you!

[riri1983]

Hi Victor, 

I want to follow up on this. I'm looking to implement this and cannot find how to implement a tax override for each product for each province.

As I followed up on (and Shay responded that it was possible), tobacco taxes in Canada not only differ by province (different regions of Canada), but are based on grams of tobacco in each product. 

In this scenario, two people in different parts of Canada could see products listed at 20$ pre-tax. Post-tax one pays 22$ and the other pays 24$. 

Additionally, in this scenario two products could be listed at 20$; Product A has 1 gram of tobacco and Product B has 50 grams. Product A could cost 22$ and Product B could cost 30$, due to the grams of tobacco determining the additional tax.

Due to this I would not be able to put a flat % by province; it would have to be on a product by product basis for each province. 

Thanks in advance, 

[Erin]

Hi, @riri1983. Thank you for sharing all of that context! For more help with this I recommend you reach out to our support team through the Help Center here. We can't see your settings here over the Shopify Community, but if you speak with us through the Help Center we can review this with you in more detail.