The built in tax system allows you to enter your sales tax into whatever state you have a physical presence in so when a customer buys from one of those states you will charge them the tax for that state.  This is the way most ecommerce sites have worked for a long time, and for the most part this is still adequate and Cartweaver 4 supports this.

Now if you find yourself in a situation with a product category or in a state where sales taxes gets far more complex, such as the requirement to charge sales tax based on the "tax zone" or county or whatever. of the customer, this can get too complex for any standalone ecommerce site to handle. In the past there have been two options - custom modify your application to try to fit the requirements, which could get very expensive, and still not be right, or fly under the radar because most states are having a terrible time trying to enforce this mess.  Neither one of these choices are good ones. 

Cartweaver 4 solves this dilema by supporting AvaTax - a third party sales tax service by Avalara that works much the same way as connection to a third party shipper for shipping rates. This system is designes to offload all of the complexities of calculating, tracking, and reporting sales taxes in whatever state you tell them to, and your Cartweaver 4 site simply pulls the sales tax total from them and adds it to the order.

This is a huge relief!  Frankly, at this point in time, for the vast majority of Cartweaver 4 users the standard built in system will still be fine. If not, it's good to know you have a solid and safe - from a tax law perspective - solution to the problem!

Lawrence Cramer
Cartweaver.com
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