We've finished a few more shops at work in recent months, including some Shopify ones. What we learned there was that Shopify is a very capable solution, provided you can adapt your requirements to the way Shopify works. We sadly have had a customer that insisted on using Shopify, but came with loads of requirements for which we needed to force shopify to work in ways it wasn't really designed for. In the end, we got it to work, but it would have cost that particular customer a lot less if he had gone for a Shopware (or magento2) solution because that kind of platforms give you more freedom if you need it.

There was a paypal integration with oledrion at the time, but I don't think it will still work without change.

Our current payments processor does tax calculation based on the delivery address. The challenge is creating the shop to match up with the product list and get the transaction completed.

I haven't looked deeply at oledrion, knowing the link from the shop to the payments side is going to be the trick, along with getting tax calculated properly.

After exploring a bit more, I am leaning towards Shopify and creating a shop on a subdomain to preserve all the SEO juice we've built up and to ease the full entry to online shop and pay without our interaction.

Hi @Steve, I was wondering if your payment provider does offer tax calculations? My current knowledge only covers services that are active in Western Europe at the moment, so I don't know about US-based payment or shipping enablers.

Have you had the chance to review oledrion? I know it's old, so probably a refactoring is really necessary, but would it work for you in its current state?

yeah, the only thing that shows the final price with all the taxes included is fuel - when you put gas in your car, the price on the pump includes it all.

There are online services that just do tax tracking and updating. Fortunately for us, nothing we have changes taxability based on location, only the amount changes. It isn't difficult for us to do, just trying to reduce the friction of the customer having to wait for someone to do the calculations and get back to them to finalize payments. Not the 1-click checkout people are becoming accustomed to.

I think the tax thing is a perfect case to throw at a specialised web service. Not only do you have to develop the functionality, you also need to make sure you stay on top of changing legislation and such. We are seeing the same issues now in Europe, now that governments have seen the big cauldron of tax money hidden in online sales somewhere. Every country in the European Union has VAT tax, but they all apply different percentages for different types of goods.

One thing I noticed last time I was with you in the States (too long ago, we're looking into a new trip with our girls this time in the next few years), is that your shops don't show the final price, tax included. In Europe, the full price must be shown in shops (even online ones) so there are different pricing strategies : either you keep the final price the same, and countries with lower tax in essence pay more for the goods, either you vary prices depending on the rate of the country. But it's a hassle in any case.