Zen Cart and Streamlined Sales Tax

Zen Cart, one of the most popular ecommerce shopping carts, is fairly simple to modify to collect local county and city sales taxes. A Local Sales Tax module exists and is easy to install.

The best Zen Cart solutions seem to use the City field to look up the local city sales tax, if any. Most solutions use the five-digit zip code to look up the local county sales tax. Zen Cart will then display and collect state, county, and city taxes. If you were using the state zone alone for collecting sales tax, you will likely need to edit the state tax rate again. Most Zen Cart users set the state zone to include the state, county, and city tax for their bricks and mortar address.

Tax rate data for Zen Cart exists in SQL format for the following states:

Arkansas

Florida

New York

After installing the Local Sales Tax module and creatng the new required MySQL table, open the state SQL file in Notepad or WordPad and copy the block of "Insert into" text into the SQL tab in PHPmyadmin and click the "GO" button.

In addition to collecting local taxes under the SSUTA, shopkeepers also have to report out the collected taxes to their state's finance agency. A Zen Cart Sales Tax Summary Report module exists which does basic reporting of sales tax collected.