Shipping and Tax Management in WordPress Shopping Cart Plugins

Depending on the location of your online store, the tax laws of your country, and your target markets, your shipping and tax management needs will vary.

Check out what level of flexibility each shopping cart plugin offer in terms of tax and shipping management.

You can click on the name of the product below to view its full review.

Shopp

Shopp takes the prize for one of the best shipping and tax management support in a WordPress shopping cart. For shipping, Shopp can do flat rate or calculate shipping based on customer location, order amount, item quantity, and order weight. Shopp also offers extra modules to calculate shipping live with FedEx, UPS, USPS, AusPost, Canada Post, Shipwire, each costing $25.

For tax management, you can specify a tax rate for each country or region you ship to, as well as a default rate. You can choose whether shipping fees are included in tax calculation or you can choose not to charge any tax at all.

Cart66

The way Cart66 handles shipping methods and calculation is very flexible and robust.

First, you can set various shipping methods, each with a default rate and an incremental amount per added item. Then, you can specify a shipping rate for each product and additional items of the same product. Or, you can specify a shipping rate based on the order amount.

Another great feature that Cart66 supports is Live Shipping Rates, which calculates shipping costs automatically based on customer location and the weight of the items in their cart. Currently, this only works with UPS. However, integration with FedEx, and USPS are currently planned.

Cart66's tax management is made for American and Canadian merchants specifically. You are able to specify a tax rate per state or province. If your store is for another country, handling taxes with Cart66 may not be possible.

GetShopped (WP e-Commerce)

GetShopped provides you with the standard shipping options. You can calculate shipping by a flat rate, by the price of the order, or by weight of the items. You can also integrate GetShopped with external shipping calculators like Australia Post, UPS or USPS to get live rates based on weight and customer location. Integration with FedEx is also available as a $25 add-on from the company.

GetShopped also has full support for tax management. You can set a separate tax rate for each region you ship to or specify a tax band to be applied on per-product basis.

eShop

Shipping and tax management in eShop seems pretty advanced. You can manage taxes and shipping by weights, countries, states, counties, provinces, modes, and more. But it's not so easy to understand and it's not documented. Fortunately, eShop is backed by a helpful support forum.

MarketPress

MarketPress shipping and tax management is not as flexible as some of the other plugins.

MarketPress is intended for shops that operate within a single state. So, you specify a single tax rate for all your orders, regardless of where they'll ship.

As for shipping, first, you select the countries to where you agree to ship. Then, you set a base shipping rate for the "lower 48 States", "Hawaii and Alaska", "Canada", and "International". Then for each product, you specify additional shipping charges when you create it.

Tribulant Shopping Cart

Tribulant Shopping Cart shipping features are great and very flexible. You can specify storewide shipping rates, per product rates, rates for bundles, and you can integrate your store with FedEx, USPS, UPS, Australia Post, and Canada Post.

And tax management in Tribulant Shopping Cart is no less sophisticated than its shipping management abilities. You can set whether you want to calculate rate or not, a default rate, whether to tax shipping fees, and finally, you can set a tax rate for various shipping regions.

Market Theme

Shipping in Market Theme also isn't as flexible as some of the other shopping cart solutions. You can only offer 3 options for shipping: standard, priority, and international. You can set a fee for each one of those types. You can also offer shipping discounts for additional units of the same product, which is cool. But that's about all you can do with shipping in Market Theme.

As for taxes, Market Theme doesn't manage or store customer shipping information or tax details. It let's your payment processor handle them. For example, if you have a Premier or Business account with PayPal, you can set it to charge taxes if the customer shipping address points to a certain state. So, you'll have to check with PayPal to see if their tax management capabilities suit your needs.

YAK

YAK allows you to specify a sales tax rate for each country that you ship to. For U.S. and Canadian merchants it is possible to specify a tax rate per state and province.

Shipping settings in YAK are flexible too. First, you assign countries to shipping zones, then for each zone, you're able to specify a total fixed cost, cost per first item and subsequent items, or cost per 100 grams and subsequent 100 gram increments.

Unlike some of the other shopping cart plugins, YAK has no live integration with any shipping carrier.

ShopperPress

Shipping management in ShopperPress is flexible and practical. First you specify general options regarding how you'd like to manage shipping in your store. For example, do you want to enable shipping at all (maybe you only sell digital goods)? Do you want to enable live shipping calculation with FedEx and UPS? Do you want to calculate shipping based on weight or price? Etc.

Then for each one of these general settings, you have specific settings, like setting your FedEx integration, price-based shipping, and so forth. You can also set a specific shipping rate for each country.

As for tax management, it is very flexible, but some merchants may find it tedious to configure. You can specify a tax rate for each country, and for some countries (such as Canada, United States, and United Kingdom), you can even specify a tax rate per State or Province.

ShopperPress tax management is tedious because it doesn't allow you to group countries, states or provinces by zones for which you can specify rates.

DukaPress

In DukaPress, shipping is determined storewide. It's not per product category or per individual product. You have 6 shipping methods to choose from: free, flat rate, flat limit rate, weight flat rate, weight class and per item. Details can be found here. If you want more flexibility with the shipping options, you can buy a DukaPress add-on for $20.

Tax management in DukaPress is so basic, though, it's almost useless. You can specify a storewide tax rate -- that's it.

wpStoreCart

Currently, you cannot charge taxes with wpStoreCart.

Shipping configurations in wpStoreCart are pretty basic. You can specify three types of flat rate

• each product with its own rate
• one flat rate that's multiplied by the number of products in cart
• one flat rate regardless of cart quantity

Fortunately, wpStoreCart supports USPS live quotes feature.

Templatic Ecommerce

You can offer four types of shipping with Templatic Ecommerce: flat rate, free, price-based, and weight-based. You cannot determine shipping based on customer location and there is no live integration with any shipping carrier.

As for taxes, there is only one option: a storewide tax rate.

Jigoshop

Jigoshop offers a variety of options and flexibility while handling Shipping and tax management. The shipping panel lets you control whether or not shipping needs to be calculated, and shows shipping method specific options.

Jigoshop (free) comes with 2 basic shipping methods: flat rate, and free shipping.

Flat Rates - lets you charge a specific amount for shipping regardless of location, cart contents and weight.

Free Shipping - lets you charge a zero amount for shipping. You can set a threshold for this if you only want to allow free shipping when a customer spends a certain amount.

Additional shipping methods can be purchased from the extensions page on Jigoshop

Jigoshop has a built-in tax calculator which uses rates you define. The following options can be set in the tax section:

Calculate Taxes – Whether or not to actually calculate taxes. Only set this to no if you are exclusively selling non-taxable items.

Catalog prices include tax – Whether or not your product prices include or exclude tax. If prices include tax then the tax amount will be calculated backwards.

Cart totals display – Whether the cart totals (sub total etc) are shown with tax included or excluded.

Additional Tax classes - Additional tax classes other than the standard rate. For example, you may want a reduced rate for books.

Zingiri Web Shop

Zingiri Web Shop lets you add custom tax categories and other taxes. As different countries and states have different taxes, the ability to create custom tax types is a very important feature to have in a Web Shop. Zingiri Web Shop also lets you add your own shipping method to the already existing ones.

TheCartPress

TheCartPress offers different options for handling shipping and tax management. The shipping panel lets you control whether or not shipping needs to be calculated, and shows shipping method specific options.

TheCartPress comes with 4 shipping methods:

1. Free Transport: Free transport for orders with cost greater than an editable minimum.
2. Flat Rate: Calculate the shipping cost by a flat or percentage formula.
3. Shipping Cost: Calculate the shipping cost using a table of weights ranges and zones.
4. Local PickUp: Local pick up.

WP Online Store

WP Online Store comes bundled with 2 Standard Shipping Modules - Flat Rate and Table Rate.

Flat Rate: You need to use this module if you want to use a flat rate shipping per order.

Table Rate: This module allows you to set whether shipping will be charged based on weight or quantity. Further, you define shipping price breaks based on weight or quantity amounts.

Example - Table Rate Shipping: A store owner wants to charge $10 for orders weighing up to 20 lbs. Any orders over 20 lbs, but under 40 lbs are charged $18.

Additional Shipping Modules containing several more shipping methods, including UPS, USPS and Multi-Zone Multi-Table are available for purchase on the WP Online Store.

Taxes in WP Online Store are grouped around tax classes and zones. You can create different tax classes for different order types. e.g Taxable Goods, Downloadable Products etc. Also zones must be assigned for tax purposes – e.g. Florida, California, Texas etc. Zones need not be limited to state names. It can be anything – country, city, area. Once the tax classes and zones are defined you can add the actual tax amount in percent.

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