Within the United States, sales taxes
vary not just from state to state but often within states as well. In fact, pretty much the only
time most vendors know exactly what to do is when shipping goods to a customer in the same
tax area as their business. At other times, well, to be perfectly honest, your guess is as good
as ours.
CHAPTER 17 ?– STORING CUSTOMER ORDERS 559
In this book, the taxation scheme we add is as simple as possible. A database table will
include information concerning various tax rates that can be applied, and the choice of these
will, for now, depend on the shipping region of the customer. All products are considered to be
taxable at the same rate. This does leave a lot to be desired, but at least tax will be calculated
and applied. You can replace it with your own specific system later.
Shipping Issues
Shipping is somewhat simpler to deal with than tax, although, again, we can make things
as complicated as we want. Because sending out orders from a company that trades via an
e-commerce front end is much the same as sending out orders from, say, amail-order company,
the practices are very much in place and relatively easy to understand. There may be new ways
of doing things at our disposal, but the general principles are well known.
You may have an existing relationship with a postal service from preonline trading times,
in which case, it??™s probably easiest to keep things as close to the old way of doing things as
possible.
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