Hi,

I just found out that the state of Texas requires charging sales taxes on online subscriptions for Texas residents.

I read the following post saying CBSubs handles taxes through Paypal:
Charging GST to Australian customers only
I configured my Paypal profile to charge sales tax for Texas residents. I tested it was working with another website I have that is using VirtueMart (although Virtuemart has the nice ability to configure taxes per country/state without needing Paypal). This is, when a customer gets redirected to Paypal and enters his/her billing information, Paypal correctly adds a sales tax to whatever price Virtuemart had sent to it only if the customer is from Texas.

With CBSubs, I'm experiencing 3 problems:
1. When I tried subscribing using CBSubs, the recurrent subscription does NOT get added the sales tax!
All my subscription plans are set to "Subscribe Users to Automatic Recurring Payments" giving a 3-day FREE trial.
Also, as I'm only using the Paypal Gateway, CBSubs is configured to go directly to Paypal upon clicking on the "Register" button (this is, No second page showing the invoice and confirmation before going to Paypal).

2. I thought the Sales tax setting might not be working with recurring payments for whatever reason, so, I created a plan and set its "Auto-recurring renewals" field to "User's choice". Unfortunately, no choice was given to the user and in Paypal the "Terms" read:
Free for the first 3 days
Then $12.90 USD for each month
As if the user had chosen "auto-recurring" renewal.
Is there a setting I am missing?

3. Since the above didn't work, I now set this new plan's "Auto-recurring renewals" field to "User's choice" to "No, single payments at a time". Unfortunately, when transferred to Paypal, the "Terms" still read:
Free for the first 3 days
Then $12.90 USD for each month
As if this plan was set to be have an "auto-recurring" renewal.
Is there anything else I should have done to have this one plan not to auto-renew?

Paypal did not add the sales tax for Texas residents in any of the above cases.

Hopefully, I'm just missing something.

Any help will be very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Carlos
P.S. Using Joomla 1.5.14, CB 1.2.1 and CBSubs 1.0.1.
Upgrading to CBSubs 1.0.2 is not possible as I had to downgrade to CBSubs 1.0.1 due the following bug in CBSubs 1.0.2:
HUGE ISSUE: Account & Subscription NOT Activated!

Post edited by: carlosleon0615, at: 2009/08/04 17:08

Thank you for your reply Beat.

I had already tried creating a plan for single payments but somehow Paypal treated it as an auto-recurring plan (maybe CBSubs sent the wrong info to Paypal?):

3. Since the above didn't work, I now set this new plan's "Auto-recurring renewals" field to "No, single payments at a time". Unfortunately, when transferred to Paypal, the "Terms" still read:
Free for the first 3 days
Then $12.90 USD for each month
As if this plan was set to be have an "auto-recurring" renewal.
Is there anything else I should have done to have this one plan not to auto-renew?

Is there anything I am missing? Is it because my other plans are auto-recurring except for this one? Or might this be a bug in CBSubs 1.0.1?

Thanks,

Carlos

Thanks beat. Indeed, I needed to enable it in the Paypal gateway.

I confirm that adding VAT by Paypal's settings for VAT works fine for single payments.

I think I read somewhere that that the sales tax calculated by Paypal (as per the profile settings) can be overriden for some items by passing some parameters.

Could it be that CBSubs is overriding the tax only for auto-recurring subscriptions?
Otherwise, it's definitely a bug in Paypal. If this is the case, will you report this bug with them? Or just let me know where I could do it.

In the meantime, how are you guys doing with the "tax" plugin/module? I read in some posts that you've been working on it. This would a great addition as this would allow us to overcome this type of problems with Paypal.

Thanks again for you quick reply beat.

Carlos

I too have a problem with PayPal/CBSubs regional tax options. I have several plans set up and need to include New Zealand GST (VAT) of 12.5%. If I set this up in PayPal a $1.00 plan in CBSubs gets charged in PayPal at $1.13. The corresponding Invoice in CBSubs shows a TOTAL payment of $1.00 LESS GST $0.13 and Pretax total of $0.87.
In other words Paypal ADDs the tax and CB Subs SUBTRACTS the tax???