We sell meats in the state of Oklahoma, both direct-to-consumer and at wholesale to retail establishments/restaurants. We also sell an occasional merch item (shirts, hats, etc.). Per state law, we are required to collect state, county, and local sales taxes on merch items; however, we are not required to charge state sales taxes on direct-to-consumer grocery items—but we ARE required to charge local (county & city) sales taxes on these items. This is situation is further complicated by the fact that we deliver the majority of our orders, thereby establishing nexus in various localities outside our retail location’s physical nexus. So, the tax collection situation could theoretically be different on virtually every order I process in a given month.
In short, apparently there’s no way to turn of state tax collection inside Shopify tax settings without also turning off local sales tax collection—but that wouldn’t totally address the scope of my situation anyway.
At this point, the only workaround I can think up is to build approximate sales tax amounts into all our individual product prices; but that’s not ideal for several reasons: namely, it’s going to make monthly sales tax filings ridiculously tedious and time-consuming unless I find a automatic filing plugin that can handle all the intricacies for me.
After reading every article I can find & lots of discussions here, as well as spending way too much time on the chat with Shopify support, I’ve found only one plugin that would potentially address all these tax collection issues—however, the product is out of our price range for the scale we are currently at. I really don’t want to leave Shopify; we’ve used it for website hosting, POS, and order/inventory management for the past year or so and have been happy EXCEPT for this, which unfortunately is a deal-breaker issue.
I’m hoping there’s someone smart out there who can offer some options.