Why is tax calculation failing on Shopify API created orders?

[tompetrossian]

Hello everyone,

Shopify orders created by API all of a sudden started not to calculate tax, our integration with another store is working properly but for another Shopify store it is always 0, and we are losing money and creating issues for our company. Does anyone have any idea why is Shopify doing this?

[Rostislav]

HI Tom, 

There is not enough information to help you. Can you explain a bit more about the architecture of your store and why you call API to create orders (I have certain presumptions , but still) . Any way first thing to check if you use the same plan on the stores. Shopify often changes the way how API functions work , and forget to notify users on the changes.   Advanced Shopify and Basic Shopify use rather different tax engines. But do come back with more info - it is an interesting case to handle.  

[tompetrossian]

Hi Rostislav,

We are using Shopify API to create orders from our third party application and I am one of the developers of that app. We are creating a draft order and then completing(making it a normal order) it. The plans are different, for the store that calculates tax properly we have the basic plan, for the non working case we have the Advanced Shopify plan.

Let me know if you need more information.

Also, the Checkout API shows right order amount(with tax), but once it’s created there is no tax in Shopify when opening the order.

Thanks,

Tom

[Rostislav]

Tax engines for basic and advance Shopify are different. Are duties enabled for the Advanced shopify plan store for the country of destination? 

[tompetrossian]

Taxes are enabled for USA(that is where we’re having trouble for taxes). But taxes and duties are disabled since it shows its for international orders. Please find info in the photos attached.

  

 

[tompetrossian]

@Rostislavdo you know why this may be happening?

[SaraFunville]

I have the same issue. Check out page shows the correct tax amount but client order confirmation email shows $0 on the "Taxes" line and the "Total" line does not have taxes in it either. But the actual credit card charge include the tax amount. I know this because I noticed no taxes were charged for customer orders so I placed an order in my shop to test it out. I need help on how to make the confirmation emails show the correct amounts.

[trulo17]

Same issue here. This seems to start approximately on September the 1st. Not consistent even for the same shop: it calculates correctly for some draft, not for another. Likely related to shops using Avalara (I know draft creation might need additional polling, but creation returns 201 but with no taxes.)

[tompetrossian]

What’s Avalara?

I was looking into polling today, in our case 201 and 202 responses both don’t have tax added(tax is 0). 
Also, during polling do you send requests to the “location” field, if yes, what kind of requests? Thanks in advance.

We’ve been having this issue starting from end of August, so it should be the same issue.

[trulo17]

Avalara is a third party used by many shops in Shopify for taxes calculations.
It's usual for such shops to have to do the additional polling. It was the case in the past (months ago), we ended up having the taxes after some polls.
With the issue (that I agree, seems to be the same), I'm getting no taxes even after polling in some scenarios (actually, I tried polling just in case, since draft order creation returned a 201, clearly indicating all calculations are done), but I'm also getting them straight from draft creation or after polling other times. It is the case sometimes changing just the zip code/state combination (might this be Avalara having issues with some states?),  will result in taxes being calculated, so, not a very consistent behavior.
*I'm not polling the url in the location header, but calling the get draft order endpoint, because of some particularities in how we do things, but that should work, too (or at least, should have worked in the past).
Really hoping someone from Shopify takes care of this as is a very serious issue.

[tompetrossian]

Thanks for the info. Can we possibly substitute Avalara with another service? At this point I don’t see any other options, the weird part is that during Checkout (using Checkout API) the tax is there but is missing from orders.

[trulo17]

Not really sure about substituting Avalara, I'd assume Shopify itself has taxes calculation functionality, but I'm not really sure of what the implications of such a change would be.

[tompetrossian]

Did this issue get fixed for anyone? We are still facing this issue and nothing from Shopify.

[Kenyasade]

I’ve actually been having this same issue for people outside of my state and now the checkout is starting to discount them this is absurd.

[Kenyasade]

 This item was $10 originally. No sales tax and they gave a discount…

[barkhouse]

I am new to Shopify and just experienced this on an order. Have you had any success in getting an answer from Shopify support? Would love to resolve quickly so I do not lose money on orders.

[Lightburg]

I'm having the same issue, did you get it figured out?

[vadimpk]

For anyone still wondering – you must have at least one tax line for the tax amount to be included into the order. You can just pass an array of one tax line where you specify the total tax you have and it should work.
P.S. I tested it on version 2024-04.