Hi Jerry,
Thank you for your response. I’ll be happy to explain some of the tax processes within Shopify below.
Enabling the option to display prices with taxes included will have different effects on the POS and the online store, which I will detail separately. First, with this option enabled on the POS, you’ll see the listed price at checkout with a breakdown of the taxes below. I will provide you with an example from my test store for a $5 product:
This will show you a breakdown of the taxes prior to the sale. Once the sale is processed, you will then have the option to email a receipt to the customer. If you choose to do this, they will then receive an emailed receipt that also includes a breakdown of the taxes charged on the order:
You’ll notice here that there’s no message that states that tax is included within the price of the product, but this can be added in manually. If you head to Settings > Notifications in your Shopify admin, you will see a template called “POS and mobile receipt” - if you click on this, it will bring up the HTML template for this email that can then be edited. You can add in any verbiage you’d like here and it will then be included in all POS emails sent moving forward. To do this for printed POS receipts, head to Settings > Customize receipts within the POS app and you will see options to add additional text here too.
For the online store, the wording that displays will depend on the theme you are using. On my test store I have the Simple theme installed, and by default there will be a message saying “Tax included” when I visit the product page:
When I proceed to the cart, there is a message that specifies that taxes are included:
Finally, at checkout, there is then a message showing how much of the order’s total is tax:
This wording is very easy to edit and can be done through the theme’s language editor. I can get here by going to Online Store > Themes in my admin, and by then precessing “Actions” and then “Edit languages” next to the theme I want to edit. Once in the theme editor, if I search for “taxes” I will see the fields for three pieces of wording I have described above:
From here it’ll then be possible to edit the wording about taxes to include whatever is required. Like the emailed POS receipt, you can also edit the online receipt which is called “Order notification” in Settings > Notifications.
The option to include taxes within the prices of products is one that is site-wide, so it cannot be toggled on for some states and not others. If you were to enable this option in your tax settings, this would therefore apply to every product on the site and the POS, irrespective of where the customer is buying from. Generally we see US merchants not enable this option as it can’t be specified on a state-by-state level. I will however also submit this as feedback to our development team as I can see why this flexibility would be a big help.
I hope I’ve been able to explain our tax processes in more detail but please do let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
Kind regards,
Victor | Shopify Social Care