Optimize Your Tax Setup with Regional Targeting for Automatic Tax Providers

We are introducing a new feature that gives merchants more control over when storefront tax calculation requests are sent to their automatic tax provider.

Now, when you set up a new tax provider, or edit an existing one, you can specify which countries and subdivisions (states/provinces) you want it to calculate tax for. A calculation request is sent to the provider based on the shopper’s address entered on your storefront cart or checkout page. Shopper addresses outside the selected regions use your store’s basic tax setup.

This new functionality is available to all stores across all plans.

How does this feature help me?

Before, when a tax provider was enabled (like Avalara AvaTax), it was used for all tax calculations across the store. For some merchants, this may not be ideal because your tax service could be estimating tax for regions you don’t sell in, or where tax calculation is simple.

• This approach can generate unnecessary API calls, which can lead to increased service costs, and slowed performance at checkout when tax calculation isn’t needed.

• It can also unnecessarily complicate tax for regions where tax calculation is relatively simple and basic tax would suffice.

By introducing this new functionality, we are allowing for new tax setup use cases. For example, as a merchant, I want to use Avalara AvaTax for the US and Canada, and basic tax for Australia. This and similar use cases that were not supported before are now possible.

The final word

If your store does not use an automatic tax provider, then you are not affected.

If your store has an existing automatic tax provider enabled, there is no change to how your taxes currently work — your tax provider will continue to calculate all storefront taxes. You may optionally configure regional tax targeting at any time, and non-targeted areas will then begin to use your store’s basic tax settings.

If you set up a new automatic tax provider, it will not calculate any taxes until you’ve configured the regions it should target. If you want it to calculate taxes everywhere, you can check the “Select All” option under Country.

To learn more about how automatic tax calculation in BigCommerce works and the tax providers we support, see our Knowledge Base documentation for Automatic Tax Setup. Start optimizing your tax provider setup with regional targeting today!