Possible to set a fixed shipping location for a specific product?

[George_C]

Is it possible to set a fixed shipping location for a specific product? 

I am trying to set up a self-checkout system for in-person sales at temporary locations. This idea is to have a QR code that directs customers to a product on the online store, which allows them to set a price (using quantities). 

This works great, except when they pay for the order, since it is on the online store, they have to enter a shipping address. This messes up the sales tax calculation, because I need all orders of this item to be charged the sales tax for the current POS location address. 

I believe this will work if I am able to set a fixed shipping address for this self-checkout product. If I set the shipping location to the temporary POS location for each event, then sales tax should be applied to all orders. 

So is it possible (perhaps with the Shopify API) to set things up so the customer doesn’t have to add a shipping location, and instead it uses a specific address supplied by me? 

[MarcoReleasitQr]

Hello @George_C 

Yes, it is possible by creating a separate product specifically for your event (and you can mark this product from Shopify as "Does not require shipping" so that the customer will not have to enter a shipping address on the checkout) and then create a tax override for that specific product so that the correct sales tax for the event is applied to all purchases. You can learn more about tax overrides and how to configure them from here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/taxes/tax-overrides

To generate your QR Codes for the events feel free to check our app Releasit QR Code Generator. The app allows you to generate fully customizable dynamic QR Codes that you can link to anything in your store (products, collections, pages, blog posts, custom URLs, prefilled carts and checkouts, and a lot more!)

You can install the app for free from the Shopify App Store here: https://apps.shopify.com/releasit-qr-codes-generator

Hope this helps, if you have any doubts or questions don't hesitate to ask!

Marco from Releasit

[George_C]

Thanks for the suggestion. This was very close to solving my issue, but it seems that Shopify calculates sales tax based on either the shipping address, or the billing address if no shipping address is provided. 

This causes issues when a customer uses a credit card from out of state (in relation to the pop-up event location). 

PayPal has a feature in their "Buy Now" buttons that allow you to set a fixed sales tax for a product, with no automatic location determination by shipping/billing address. 

If these tax overrides were truly overriding the sales tax setting, and charging the override tax rate regardless of shipping/billing, it would have worked out perfectly. 

Thanks again. 

[MarcoReleasitQr]

Hello @George_C , thank you for the reply!

I just made a few tests on my end and it looks like Shopify requires you to have a valid US sales tax registration number to be able to actually make test orders with this.

But if you are correctly registered in the US: if you add a product based tax override for each state (which means you have to add 50 tax overrides, one for each state) it should work correctly. The idea being that, if your popup event is in NY you can just create 50 tax overrides for each state for that specific product and set the tax rate on the override to x%. Obviously if you know that the people who attend your events come only from 10 states you would have to create only 10 overrides.

I might be wrong on this as I was not able to test it on my end but it might be worth trying on your end!

Hope this helps!

Marco from Releasit

[George_C]

This is an interesting approach. However in the U.S. sales tax is based on "nexus", which means either you have a physical presence in the state, or you've made X number of sales, or exceeded X total amount of sales. So I only have nexus in a few states. 

So yeah if I had nexus in all 50 states, this could be a solution. But since I do not, I can't do this because otherwise Shopify would be calculating sales tax for all orders on my shop, in all 50 states, and that's shouldn't happen. 

If Shopify just allowed the override to work at the product level, this would be easy. 

Thanks again! 

[MarcoReleasitQr]

Got it, thanks for the explanation on this, I will keep it in mind in the future!