Goal: apply a reduced food tax rate (4%) instead of the default state rate (9.25%) via Products Override in Shopify Taxes.
Key finding: only manual collections (hand-curated product lists) appear in the tax override selector; automated collections (rule-based) are not supported. The “Home page” collection shows because it’s a manual collection.
Implementation guidance:
Create a manual collection containing all products that need the food tax rate.
If all variants of a product need the override, add the product to the manual collection; the override will apply to all its variants.
If only some variants need the override, Shopify cannot target variants in collections. The workaround is to split those variants into separate products and add only the needed ones to the manual collection.
Operational impact: for stores with many products/variants, maintaining a manual collection can be tedious. Feedback about this limitation was submitted to Shopify developers.
Open question: how to handle varying qualified food tax rates by ZIP code, and whether an app can manage this. No solution was provided in the thread; the question remains unanswered.
Status: partially resolved (manual collection requirement and variant behavior clarified); ZIP code variation unresolved.
Summarized with AI on December 25.
AI used: gpt-5.
We sell food only products, so need to override our state’s tax rate (9.25%, which is currently being calculated) with the tax rate for food items (4%). In Settings → Taxes I see a Products Override section (Set custom tax rates for a collection of products.), which is perfect. This would resolve our issue.
HOWEVER:
Upon creating the new collection and adding all product items to it and saving it, the new collection does not display in the Filter Collections text box in the Add Product Override dialog window when you enter the name.
In fact, none of my collections display when you type in the first few letters of its name, or the entire name, regardless of case. The “ONLY” collection that displays is one called “Home page”, which I do not recall creating.
Am I missing something here? Is this feature broke? Can anyone get me on the right track please?
Glad to hear you’ve found the tax override option to help resolve your issue, but sorry to hear you’ve been having difficulty implementing it. I have an idea as to why you aren’t seeing your collections, are all of your collections automated collections?
Tax overrides can only be created using manual collections, not automated collections. There is more about how to setup a manual collection for a tax override in our Help Center. In short, you’ll need to create a manual collection for these products to be able to apply a tax override. Once you create a manual collection, you’ll see it displayed in the list you are referring to.
I do understand that this likely an inconvenience, since you already have existing collections that you would prefer to use. Due to this, I’ve submitted some feedback about the issue to our developers, as the more feedback we receive the better.
Let me know how this goes! If you have any further questions, I’d be happy to help.
Appreciate the quick response Hilary. And I appreciate your sending that up as a suggestion for improvement of the Collection feature. Yes, all collections are Automatic. Upon reading over the instructions for creating a manual collection, under the section titled “Add Products to a Manual Collection”, I see this note…
Note
You can’t add product variants to a collection.
We do have product variants and they are also taxable items, so guessing I’d have to remove all variants.
We have 335 products in our store, 60 of which are variants. Manually adding and removing them from this collection every time we add/remove products will be tedious and prevent us from keeping our operation streamlined and straightforward.
If I understand everything fully, for my situation at least, the following steps are necessary to rectify this issue and allow us to collect the proper tax for our products:
Remove existing variants and create separate new products for each previous variant.
Create a new Collection and manually add all products to the collection.
In Settings->Taxes->Manage, create a tax override for all products using the new manual Collection.
Does this appear correct? Is there anything missing?
Thanks for your detailed reply and further explanation of your store and products. Sorry to hear that the process will be so cumbersome for you to create this override. As I mentioned, I have already submitted this feedback to our developers on your behalf.
To clarify, you have products that contain variants where not all variants need this specific tax override, is that correct? This is why you’ve stated that you need to create new products for each variant. Just would like to confirm this statement before confirming your posted next steps.
If yes, the reason you can’t add products that contain variants to this new manual collection for the tax override is not all variants require the override, then your listed steps are correct. As it’s not possible to only add specific variants to a collection, as you mentioned.
However, if this is not the case, you shouldn’t need to create new products for the variants if all variants will require the override. When you add a product with variants to the manual collection, and then add the tax override to the collection, all variants contained in that product will now have the assigned tax override.
Let me know if you need any further clarification here!