I concur that this does not work for B2B customers. We have tax exemptions set up for B2B companies, customer logins assigned to locations for the companies, and when they checkout they are being charged tax. Shopify can you investigate and fix this?
Topic summary
Merchants need to exempt B2B customers with resale certificates from sales tax while charging B2C customers normally. Initial solutions suggested using the “Collect tax” checkbox in standard customer accounts, but users reported this doesn’t work with Shopify Plus B2B company profiles.
Avalara Integration Workaround:
- Users successfully resolved tax exemption issues by switching from Manual Tax to Basic Tax and integrating Avalara
- Critical requirement: Use “b2b:” prefix before the company location ID (not customer ID) in Avalara’s Customer Code field
- Email addresses must match between Avalara and Shopify accounts
- Create tax-exempt customers in Avalara before creating them in Shopify
- Must upload separate resale certificates for each state where customers ship
- No official documentation exists for this process; solution discovered through trial and support sessions
Recent Platform Update:
Shopify now offers three tax collection options at the company/customer level:
- Collect tax
- Don’t collect tax
- Collect tax unless exemptions apply
This feature appears available since API version 2025-01, though documentation remains limited. Users outside the US may experience different behavior, particularly with federal tax components that cannot be exempted on B2B orders.
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