We Are Getting Messages About Sales Tax But Our Site Is Not A Store - It's A Catalog Website

Accounting & Taxes
1

We are currently getting Sales Tax messages from Shopify and in the dashboard, but our company is not engaging in e-commerce on the platform. We have built the website as an information/catalog site and all sales we have are through our customer service department by phone. We absolutely are registered for sales taxes on actual sales.

We use the order form capability of our theme as a “quote request” form instead. We get as many as two dozen legitimate inquiries per week that could move to an actual sale. Prior to last month, we were getting hit hard by spambots making hundreds of fraudulente “orders” which have triggered sales tax threshold warnings, but as none of these are sales, is there any way to stop these from happening? Or do we just have to ignore these messages?

2

A few things to clarify for your situation.

  1. Are you canceling these fraudulent orders? Canceled orders should not go through Shopify’s tax reporting.
  2. What does your order evaluation workflow look like?
  3. What is your payment capture setting? If set to automatic after checkout, this means any fraudulent order is automatically accepted and payment is collected. This means even if you cancel the order you still pay the processing fee. If you change this to either after fulfillment or manual, this gives you the chance for post-order evaluation and cancelation without the fees applying.
  4. To compliment the manual payment capture method, Shopify Flow allows you to automate cancelations based on certain criteria that you can set. This would happen relatively quickly after the order creation, before payment capture.
  5. Have you looked into a legitimate request form? This would completely bypass any order capabilities and direct all orders to be manually created on the back end i.e. over the phone.
  6. To compliment your information/request only platform, have you disabled all cart and navigation and links to cart?

Right now: Cancel all orders that are still open and aren’t legitimate. That should ultimately clean up the records. Also get a dedicated request form.

3
  1. As the webmaster, I had no concerns with fraudulent orders [quote requests]. I was unaware of them until the customer service department, who were being inundated with hundreds of fake requests every day, 24-7 brought it to my attention. After a year of this happening. There are thousands of fraudulent quote requests. I began canceling them in bulk, but soon learned that the UI in Shopify limited me to just 250 at a time. And the canceling process took about a second per fraud order. Determining the fraud orders and canceling them without infringing on the legit ones was far too time consuming. So at a certain point I did a daily cleanup which still took about 40 minutes on average. We eventually found a plug-in that works very effectively to stop bot requests. But the many thousands of bot requests are still in the order queue. I don’t think I could clean it out in a week’s work.
  2. I used to manually review them and it was easy to spot bot activity. Just very time consuming. Now there’s no need. All inquiries are legit thanks to the plug-in we use.
  3. There is no payment capture set on the site. It literally cannot happen. None of the machinery of e-commerce has been enabled here.
  4. The point of the site for the company is to engage visitors to either call and speak to a CSR or submit a quote request form, after which the CSR calls them. We do not compete online with our resellers hence the absence of e-commerce on the site. The main reason for the site is to provide sales support resources for our smaller resellers.
  5. The developers who coded this site must have edited the order form to do it quickly. But it is tied into the ordering system that’s baked in. We would have to budget for further development to get a request form that isn’t tied to the order system.
  6. There is no cart on this site. All e-commerce machinery is disabled.
4

That’s great. So you have no more problems except cleaning up orders that aren’t valid. Sounds like it took a good minute for the cs department to notify you. Glad you got it all straightened out. Once the bad orders are canceled, the tax threshold should go away and the warnings should stop. Matrixify should be able to do that relatively quickly. Do consider a form app. Most are cheap, some are free. Shopify Forms could easily handle a simple request form.

5

Hi @LeisureCraft

This is Vineet from Identixweb, a Shopify Development Agency.

I do second @Maximus3 's suggestion to consider a form app as well and to cancel all the bad orders. Shopify Forms is a good choice for the app.

6

Add Google reCAPTCHA v3 or any other captcha tool that is the best solution.

7

I’d move the quote request off the order system entirely if possible. Shopify Forms is free and should work well for a simple “request a quote” flow, and pairing it with captcha/reCAPTCHA should help keep bots from submitting junk requests.

For the valid submissions, you could keep the workflow semi-automated. Export the good form submissions to a spreadsheet, clean/review them there, then use an import tool like Altera to upload those rows back into Shopify as draft orders or customer records. That way spam never hits your order history, but the real quote requests can still be turned into actionable Shopify records without manually re-entering everything.

8

It took some time but I’ve cancelled all of the fraudulent quote requests [tallied as “orders” in Shopify] and now the total number is below 9,999 [1,169] for the first time in several years. The plug-in has arrested bot activity so I’ll leave it as well enough alone for now. Unless something else happens.

9

Hi @LeisureCraft .

Hope you are having a nice day.

Bots orders count as real sales in Shopify’s tax tracker, which is why the warning.
Fixes,
Add Captcha to your form.
Turn on fraud filter settings for checkout.
Cancel fake orders, don’t leave them open.
Best fix: use a separate quote form, not checkout, no fake ones, never become orders.