Tax class support

[arraypress]

It would be useful to have basic tax class support to allow a store to set different rates for different categories of products - for example digital and physical (t-shirts, merchandise, etc). Woocommerce has similar functionality and it makes it easy to sell different types of products.

[pippinsplugins]

I'm up for considering the idea so long as there's a concrete example of where this is needed for digital products. Are you aware of any cases where digital products need different tax classes?

[arraypress]

@pippinsplugins, the best examples I can give are digital services that can be sold via EDD or physical products using simple shipping. A digital service may be a customized job for a download, such as adding a logo and sending it back to the customer. This wouldn't fall under the 2015 place of supply VAT rules and thus a different tax rate would need to be applied.

For example in the UK (and EU) digital services aren't categorized the same as digital goods (downloadable items) and need a different VAT rate applied across the whole of the EU. However this isn't currently possible within EDD, fundamentally restricting your store to selling only one type of product unless a secondary eCommerce plugin is used.

There was discussion of bringing in lower VAT (tax) rates for e-books compared to traditional downloadable products, though I believe this has only been brought into action in Italy at present.

[cklosowski]

This is going to open a whole new realm of concerns and risks, just looking at the WooCommerce tax system (which I've had to dig into recently). It's not as simple as allowing a tax on a category or product.

Once we institute this level of taxation we need to also include a few other things like Tax Priority (order of application) and Tax Compounding (if one tax should include a previously applied tax before it's calculated). All this because now we're instituting a system that could allow multiple taxes to be applied, at length.

I'm up for seeing if we can do it...but this is going to be a long term project with very real risks that will have to be considered. Being that this is the first time I've seen it be asked for...I almost want to think it's plugin territory to enhance the taxes, or have it be something that one of the existing tax add-ons can introduce.

[cklosowski]

So had some more thoughts on this while on the road today. I want it in core. After dealing with some stuff in a WC site, it made sense.

I think we should see if we can make it happen. It might be risky but if we do it along a complete redesign of our tax settings we have have the opportunity to really improve the whole tax system.