DPM And Taxes

[ledi51]

Hello, I'm a developer for an Authorize merchant. My client didn't want to go through the steps to acquire an SSL certificate, so we use the Direct Post Method for processing payment on his website.

My question is about handling taxes. We live in Minnesota and the sales tax here is 7.375 %. However, according to my client, we will not charge taxes to people outside MN. Is he correct?

If so, I can only think of two ways to remove the sales tax from the checkout form.. number one would be a javascript snippet that checks the 'state' field and if it's MN, it adds the sales tax to the order. The downside to this is that not all browsers have javascript, plus I feel like it could be easily manipulated.

The second option is to ask what state they live in PRIOR to actually showing the form, and then use that to determine whether there will be tax, server-side. However I feel that there should be a better way of doing this, I'd rather just have the checkout form than having to add an extra step. So I'd prefer not to do this either.

Is there something I'm missing? Or are these the only ways to process taxes?

[TJPride]

If you don't have a physical presence in a state, you don't have to pay sales tax for it. So sales tax would only be applicable in MN. And yes, you'd have to have them specify their state before they go to the DPM, and they could lie and there'd be nothing you could do about it. But if you know roughly what percentage of customers the client is going to get from in-state, you could just hike the price accordingly for everyone and then it'll average out (for instance, if 10% of your customers are from in-state and the rate is 7.375, you need to raise the price using the formula:

Old Price * 1.07375 = Taxed Price

Old Price * 0.9 + Taxed Price * 0.1 = New Price

So if your product costs $100, the taxed price would be 107.375 and the new price would be 100.7375. ($100.74).

Only other option is a cart with SSL and charging through AIM, which it sounds like you don't want to do.