BigCommerce Sales Tax
Get to know BigCommerce sales tax basics
BigCommerce is a leading fully hosted software service that millions of businesses use to build, run, and manager ecommerce stores. It’s perfect solution for fast-growing and well-established businesses. According to BigCommerce, the company has 60,000 customers around the world and a client base that includes established brands like Sony, Toyota, Ben and Jerry’s, Skull Candy, Ted Baker, and PayPal. Like brick-and-mortar stores, online retailers are required by the government to collect sales tax on applicable orders. BigCommerce allows business owners to setup tax configurations manually as well as connect third-party applications to automate sales tax collection.
Sales Tax Overview
Table of Contents
Marketplace Responsibility
Some online platforms used for selling products are considered Marketplace Facilitators. This means that the platform is responsible for collecting and remitted sales tax. This removes the responsibility to collect and remit sales tax as a seller on those platforms. BigCommerce is not considered a Marketplace Facilitator, so the sellers on this platform are responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax.
Seller Responsibility
BigCommerce retailers are responsible to collect and remit sales tax on applicable orders themselves. The platform does not handle the tax collection or the tax settings for sellers. Before enabling tax collection for your online store, it’s important to evaluate where you have sales tax nexus and whether your products are taxable in those jurisdictions.
Getting Started with BigCommerce Sales Tax
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- Complete a thorough sales tax nexus review for both physical nexus and economic nexus.
- Register necessary sales tax account.
- Obtain sales tax certificates.
- Enable sales tax collection on all required platforms for the registered jurisdictions.
- File sales tax returns and maintain sales tax account.
Sales Tax Collection
BigCommerce provides online sellers the option to enable sales tax collection either manually or automatically using a third-party software. The best option for your online store will depends on the products you sell, and the jurisdictions that you have a responsibility to collect and remit sales tax for.
Sales Tax Reports
The Sales Tax Report can be viewed under Analytics › Sales Tax Report. Your control panel user account must have the Order Statistics permission enabled along with either Store Overview Report or Carts Report to view this report.
This report provides a summary of sales tax collected for the date specified in the Date Range field.
You will find the following details:
- Period — The time period for the row listed as a date, a month, or a year. This is determined by the List by field.
- Tax Type — This is the tax jurisdiction you need to remit taxes too.
- Tax Rate — This is the tax rate, expressed as a percentage.
- Number of Orders — This is the number of orders the tax rate was applied to within the selected date range.
- Tax Amount — This is a sum of the taxable amount.
How are multiple orders with the same tax type reported? All recorded order values are added together daily into a single line item for each tax type. You can see the number of orders included in the calculation next to the tax amount. This allows you to easily identify the tax collected for each tax entity.
Selecting a Date Range
There are a number of preset date ranges you can choose from in the Date Range field. You can also summarize the report by day, month or year in the List by field. Click Go after making your selections. You can select Custom to enter a date range that falls outside the preset ranges.
Exporting Your Report
To export this report to a CSV file, click Export. The exported file will show the collection period, the type of tax, the tax rate applied, the number of orders in that period, and the amount of tax collected.
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