Miva Merchant sales tax requires a solution like AccurateTax for many retailers to have tax compliance. Although Miva Merchant offers basic sales tax functionality that works for some retailers, it is often not enough for many sellers to meet their state's sales tax requirements. Most US-based retailers use either the built-in State Based Sales Tax module, or a third-party module that determines tax rates based on a 5-digit zipcode. While these offer certain attractive features, including a low cost of entry, in many states they will keep a merchant from having true sales tax compliance.
The truth is, many states have more than one tax rate, however – taxes may be defined by a county, a city, a shopping mall, a transit authority, and more.
The state-based sales tax module that ships with Miva Merchant only allows one tax rate per state. This will calculate correct sales tax in most single-rate or origin-based states, but will not work if different addresses within a state require different tax rates.
Third-party modules that calculate sales tax on a 5-digit zipcode come a little closer to providing compliance, but in many states two addresses within the same zip code can have different tax rates. In fact, even the zip+4 can't pinpoint the correct sales tax rate in some states. This is why many retailers need a Miva sales tax service.
Only AccurateTax.com's TaxTools products give Miva Merchant users the ability to accurately calculate sales tax on their e-commerce transactions no matter how complicated their states' laws.
Each of our sales tax products has been integrated as a module for Miva Merchant sales tax. The module is installed and used in place of your existing sales tax module. These modules call out to the AccurateTax.com servers at appropriate points during the customer's checkout process, to validate and scrub the shipping address, and to return any applicable sales tax rate(s), which are then used to calculate the amount of sales tax that the customer is charged.
Pricing for AccurateTax is based on the number of calls your website makes to our service. This is roughly the number of sales plus the number of shopping carts that are abandoned after the next-to-last step of checkout (technically, the OPAY screen), when taxes are calculated, both that include only your taxable states. For example, if you only have to collect sales tax in California, and you average 100 monthly orders to California, and you have another 20 shopping carts that are abandoned after reaching the OPAY screen, whose shipping address was California, then your site would make approximately 120 calls per month.
We want to make AccurateTax affordable for businesses of every size. You can see our pricing structure here.
Get a free trial of AccurateTax for Miva Merchant by completing this form, or contact us and we'll answer any questions you have and help you get started.