line items re: shipping vs. PayPal

[Servelan]

I'm using the latest version, not upgraded, and PayPal Express for payments. We've moved, so it's been several months since I touched my site and several tries at searching the forums haven't popped up any threads on this so if I once knew the answer it's gone missing.

In Washington we have to charge sales tax on shipping fees. ZenCart properly adds tax on shipping, but when the order's sent to PayPal, the part of the tax for shipping is added on to shipping, not broken out as part of the tax:

ZENCART:
Item Sub-Total: $0.60
Flat Rate (Best Way): $3.00
WA sales tax: $0.34 (correct tax amount)
Total: $3.94


PAYPAL:
Item total $0.60
Tax $0.05
Shipping and handling $3.29
Total: $3.94

The total tax on PayPal's end looks like only five cents as opposed to the actual 34 cents.

I presume this is 'normal', but is there any way to modify this inside ZenCart? If not, should I tell customers? Or does anybody care?

[DrByte]

PayPal doesn't allow for splitting the shipping into both shipping-and-taxes settings, hence they are added together as the total shipping fee.

If you want to get them to change that, please log a feature request with them: www.paypal.com/mts

Talk to your Tax Accountant professional to determine whether the display is really a problem for you or not. I suspect not, but don't take my opinion for it: Your tax professional is the one you should be asking.

[Servelan]

Thanks! I will definitely pester PayPal to offer this as I know there's at least one other state required to charge tax on shipping.

[kuroi]

As do many European countries, where shipping is treated as a service delivered from the place of origin.

[Servelan]

Here is PayPal's response to my suggestion:

"The tax, shipping, and amount values are all passed to PayPal and we display what is provided. For example, if a "tax" value of "5.00" was passed than that is what we will show for the "Tax" field on the check pages. The same applies for shipping and amount charges but the variable names are different ("amount" and "shipping").

What appears physically on your website may not be what is actually sent in the code to PayPal to define the various charges. You can do a header check during the redirection process between your website and PayPal to see what the "tax" (or "tax_rate"), "shipping", and "amount" values are being passed to PayPal along with all the other item details. "

[DrByte]

Blah blah blah. Of course they display what's sent to them.

But ... PayPal only offers a SHIPPINGAMT field. No SHIPPINGTAXAMT field to specify JUST the tax-portion of the shipping cost.

And, since we can't send products and their taxes plus shipping and skip the shipping tax and still expect them to be able to add it up to the full amount being charged, we have to add the shipping tax to the SHIPPINGAMT field so the math works.

I repeat: there's no way to send the "shipping tax" separately from the "shipping" unless you want to skip ALL the line-item details and just have a single aggregate purchase amount. In that case you'd never see any of the details of the purchased items showing on the PayPal receipt.