How do you manage tax for free influencer orders?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Managing tax and reporting for free influencer orders in Shopify without distorting revenue metrics. Users need a way to create influencer orders that: (a) don’t count as revenue, (b) still calculate/display applicable taxes, and (c) keep inventory, shipping, and reporting consistent inside Shopify.

Current workflows and issues:

  • Marking an order as paid records revenue in reports, which is inaccurate for giveaways.
  • Applying a 100% discount makes the order total 0, but taxes still need to be tracked/paid and aren’t displayed on the order.
  • Some handle this outside Shopify: manually reduce inventory and ship via a courier, losing reporting visibility and incurring higher operational cost; desire for the sencloud courier label print process to run through Shopify.

Ideas mentioned:

  • Possibly manage tax tracking via external accounting software.
  • Third-party app suggestion: “Creator Gift Link” to send free products without the 100% discount approach (no confirmation it solves tax display/reporting).

Status: Multiple users share the need; no definitive solution or native feature identified. Discussion remains open with the key question unresolved.

Summarized with AI on January 9. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hi,

how do you guys handle the free influencer orders?

If we give away stuff to influencers, we usually create an order and just mark it as payed. But then it shows up in the statistics as revenue.

By giving a 100% discount, the whole price is 0. But we have to pay and keep track of the taxes for these products. So it would be great to create an order for influencers, and still have the tax displayed. Maybe we need to do this with our accounting software.

2 Likes
2

no answers here. have this same question.

3 Likes
3

I have the same question…Hope someone can help us. Because until I know, we ‘process’ influencer orders outside the system. We manually reduce the inventory in shopify, then we go to the courier and send it out (at a higher cost and with no visibility in the choppy reporting). What we would prefer would be a means of processing in Shopify and then also have the sencloud courier label print process go through.

4

This product seems good for giving influencers free products quickly instead of doing the 100% discount thing: https://apps.shopify.com/creator-gift-link