I have exactly the same problem . I removed from shipping zones most of those countries but still showing up . did you find a way of suppressing those ? thanks
Wish there was a tutorial. Annoying that I can’t remove a tax region I don’t want.
@Gabe We have the same problem on one of our managed stores. Is there any way to remove the unused countries from the list?
Glad to help here folks!
The Shipping Profiles are where we add the ship-to countries which are then reflected in the coupled tax settings. Many of us make the initial mistake of adding “All” default countries (at region header-level instead of [email removed] country item-level) to the shipping zones which causes a huge list of countries (like some islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for example) to scroll down through when selecting the ship-to country in the first step of the checkout.
Tbh, if the ship-to is e.g. the UK, which is miles down at the bottom of the list, then this definitely does not improve the customer experience and can even add to checkout friction. So a good call here is to whittle down the ship-to countries to the essential ones in the shipping profile world.
The countries in the tax settings
The not so good news is that currently it is not possible to remove countries from the tax settings. It is, however, a fairly benign issue, in that it does not really affect or disrupt your business flow in any negative way. It just makes the tax settings workflow a bit more cumbersome. So a good practice here is to set the tax rates to 0% in any country in that list that you do not intend shipping to. If your region is e.g. Canada or the United States, then delete any tax registrations. If you are using the ‘old’ tax engine for the United States (zip codes), uncheck the automatic taxes checkbox and ensure the United States is set to 0.
I have now sent this up to our Developers so they can consider this pain-point for a future system release when we may see a decoupling of the shipping and the tax settings from each other, I cannot say anything for sure though.
Hope that helps guys!
That is brutal.
Glad I found this, I’ve been pulling my hair out for hours trying to figure out why I was charging tax on every country in the world, when I only have ONE selected and set up.
So my tax page thinks it’s only charging tax to the one country, but the shipping page secretly overrides this due to shipping profiles? And there is currently no way around this short of manually going through all the countries on Earth and resetting them? My tax page states “not collecting” and shows 0% on all these countries. By trial and error I discovered that if I reset it to default, save, and then set to 0% again and save… that cured it.
And if that’s my only recourse… that is unacceptable. Please tell me I’m wrong.
Yes and no. If you “initially” added the shipping zones at header-level instead of at country-level then you will see all countries listed in your tax settings. But what you set in the tax settings will determine what tax you charge in whatever relevant ship-to zone. If you only have one ship-to country set up in the tax settings then you will have gross-pricing incl. tax for that country in the checkout depending on what country the user enters in the shipping step. For all other countries, you will be net-pricing your products.
Here some pics taken from my own test store:
Then you decide in the tax settings whether you want to charge tax or not per each tax zone, either inclusive and gross-pricing or exclusive and net-pricing. Shopify works with net-pricing by default so your product prices will be the same whether incl. or excl. tax. There’s no negative tax override anymore since 2016 when Shopify still had that option.
Your Tax ID
Have you entered your tax ID for your ship-to zone? It won’t really work properly until you do so. Sales tax is automatically calculated and applied to orders. Make sure you’re registered for sales tax when collecting tax. I would go through all these docs with a fine-tooth comb.
Thanks for that!
Yeah initially I had two zones set up at the header level. I’m not going to charge the customer for shipping, so one zone was those countries my fulfillment provider ships to and the other zone was those it doesn’t ship to. So between them both I had all the countries set. Being new to all this, at the time I figured it would make sense to separate them lol. Really regretting that now, what I mess!
Was any of this noted clearly somewhere and I just glossed over it, or is it a major Oops! in the Shopify system?
I think you probably were setting up your taxes during the system switchover to the new tax engine, which happened since the beginning of the year mainly because of Brexit and the knock-on effect of that. This meant that new features were being added to make all merchants more tax compliant, especially in the EU and because of Brexit. One major change is the need to set up registration-based tax settings with VAT IDs and add your tax registration ID for each ship-to country in the tax settings, designed “to help make every shop more tax compliant”. But the docs can clarify more about that. : )
When you have such problems, the first thing you need to do is write to support them. And when you explain everything to them in detail, they will definitely help you. I immediately found Shopify’s phone number and called them when I encountered a similar problem. And then, I had to create a pay stub online because I also started having problems with the tax service. After all, I did not write out payment receipts to my employees. In short, I constantly have some problems with taxes, then on Shopify, then with the state, although it seems to me that I do everything legally.
