[Not a bug] Tax bug - 1.3.9d - for country states different to where the shop is

[deviouscow]

Damn! Just figured out the cause. I can see why it didn't work, but I think the way it works is wrong (or at best, the terms used are ambiguous)

My "Basis of Product tax" / "Basis of shipping tax" items were set to "Store" rather than "Shipping"

There is a problem here as my tax zone definition includes all the states of Australia, so therefore when you sign up as a user in a different state, you should be considered in the same zone, (ie. the one zone containing ALL the states) and therefore the tax rate should have been applied.

I can see why this might not be considered a bug though, so I suggest the following.

Can you please change some of the places where the term "Zone" is used to something like "State/Territory"? When you configure your store you set up a Country and a Zone - which for me is a State.

Then, when you set up a zone for tax reastons, you create a zone name (which could be anything and isn't necessarily a state/territory like the last zone had to be), but that zone contains sub-zones which in turn contain zones (ie. state/territory). Having a zone containing a sub-zone containing a zone to me suggests that at least one of those "zones" should be called something else.

[DrByte]

Zones can be used for many things, including taxes, and shipping and shipping restrictions, and payment module restrictions, and more. That's why you can define your own "Zone Definitions" in the "Zone Definitions" section of the admin area. It's up to you how you choose to use each one, whether for single purposes or shared.
If we were to rename them to "State/Territory" then that would be inaccurate since that's not necessarily what they're used for.

[deviouscow]

I can see that, it just gets very confusing when you have a zone, containing a subzone, which contains a zone and the two "zones" have two different meanings (one is whatever you want it to be, the other is a state/territory/etc, yet they're called the same thing).