Newest PayPal bug: Sales Tax not being charged

Workaround: Turn off "PayPal account optional"!

[MichaelBluejay]

We just got an order in which PayPal didn't apply the sales tax like they were supposed to. I called Support, was transferred twice, and 30 minutes later I was told that it's an "issue" that they're looking into, and that the workaround is to turn off "PayPal account optional". So customers will be required to sign up for a PayPal account if they don't already have one in order to check out.

I asked if this was expected behavior, or if it used to work correctly and it's a new problem, but the rep couldn't say. She did say that they've received some calls "in the last few weeks" about that issue, so that tells you how seriously PayPal takes the problem, since they're evidently in no hurry to fix it.

This hasn't happened on all our orders. This is a brand-new store and we've received only a few orders, but the first couple did have sales tax properly applied.

I asked if I could check the status on this problem on their website or if I'd have to call back. Go ahead and guess the answer.

Our setup is that we run a homegrown shopping cart where I hand the whole shopping cart form off to PayPal once the customer clicks Check Out. We don't use any sales tax fields, we rely on PayPal to add sales tax if the customer has a taxable address in the same state. (We set that option in our PayPal account preferences.) I'll look into adding a sales tax field into our shopping cart to pass to PayPal to see if that helps, because we already give customers the option of clicking a box to turn on the tax calculation so they can see the total. I'm worried that if they're in a taxable state but DON'T click that box and we pass a blank sales tax field to PayPal then they won't charge the tax.

PayPal has more bugs than a roadkill picnic.

[pp_rb]

What are the scenarios where tax is incorrectly applied (or omitted)?

Does it appear to be all "Account Optional" payments, or is there some specific conditions that cause the tax to be wrong?

EDIT: Oops, looks like you did say when you expect tax to be calculated, which is when the shipping address is in the same state as yours. Are you getting a mix of orders (shipped within your state) where the tax is & is not applied?

[MichaelBluejay]

Good questions, I forgot to check whether our previous customers had PayPal accounts or not. It looks like the payment notification email from PayPal doesn't tell me that explicitly, but this recent order with the problem was the *only* one which had the little warning at the bottom that says "This address is unconfirmed." So evidently all the previous customers had PayPal accounts.

Summary of in-state customers:

Three with PayPal accounts: Tax applied correctly

One without PayPal account: Tax not applied

Since I wrote our shopping cart from scratch myself, I was able to go in and easily have it print the manual sales tax field to pass along to PayPal only if the customer has checked the "Calculate Sales Tax" box on our cart. I pass the field only if the customer has checked the box, to avoid the situation in which an in-state customer fails to check the box and I pass along a sales tax field with a value of zero, so I'd be instructing PayPal not to charge sales tax.

However, if an in-state customer with no PayPal account fails check the box, then I pass no sales tax field to PayPal, and they don't pay any tax. Unless I turn off "PayPal account optional".

If Google made it easy to pass custom order data through their system (and were better documented in general) I'd be looking at them right now. Isn't competition supposed to make companies compete on things such as reliability and ease of use? I'm not seeing it.