Now In Your Shop: Sales Tax Autopilot

We often stress over them and sometimes dread them: you got it, it's taxes. But Big Cartel is doing our part to help ease the burden. Based on new state sales tax laws, Big Cartel will automatically calculate and collect sales tax on all U.S. bound orders.

There's a new sales tax tool built into your shop admin (we call it Sales Tax Autopilot) that will automatically calculate and remit sales tax on purchases made in your shop. This applies to online orders for sales made into all states and territories that have a sales tax.

How it works

As orders come in, we'll calculate the sales tax for each order based on your shop location and tax code. You’ll see how much sales tax was collected and remitted (that's the fancy word for "passed along to your state's tax agency) in the order detail, and you can use that info when reporting sales and/or tax collected on your behalf to your state.

This will cover sales tax for many shops, but always be sure to talk to an accountant or other tax specialist who can confirm the appropriate tax codes for your products. We're doing our best to help, but these things can be complicated.

International shops

For shops located outside of the US, things work a little differently. If your currency is set to USD and an order is headed to the US, we'll collect and remit tax just like for our US-based shops. Otherwise, you'll be in charge of setting the tax rate and remitting the tax to your own government agency. For European stores, you can choose to collect tax for your home country or for the entire European Union. All other countries can set taxes for their store's home country.

That recommendation to talk with a tax pro applies here too. Rules vary and are changing quickly as online selling grows and evolves, so it's good to make sure you're in full compliance with your local tax laws.

We hope that Sales Tax Autopilot takes one more thing off your to-do list. Read up on the details about your sales tax options for US stores and non-US stores. And if you have any questions, our support team is here to help.