OK, Im new to shopping sites and sales in general. So I guess I am allowed one or two stupid questions!

I am helping someone create a shopping site for their business located in North Carolina. Its my understanding that they have to charge tax's to NC residents since he has a physcal pressence in this state. All fine and good. So here is the stupid question -

Do I setup the tax rate in CCSCP or in PayPal? It would seem to me that it would be a paypal setting. A system has to determine the tax rate by shipping address, which I will not enter in until I check out through PayPals system, correct?

I guess what I am getting at is how does this all work together. I set up the tax rate in CC and seen where I can select a shipping destination at my cart. What would prevent me from selecting Nevada, or anywhere else that I dont collect taxes for, as my shipping destination within my shopping cart and then entering in my North Carolina shipping address in paypal to get out of paying the taxes that are only associated to NC.

Not sure if all of that makes any sense but if anyone can make out what Im trying to say and lend me some info I would greatly appreciate it.

Anything done using Shopping Cart Creator programs is done in Creator. There is no external data pulled from anywhere, only sent to your payment system. So in other words, taxes are done within the program not PayPal. PayPal only handles the data it gets and records the sale for you, collects the money and sends you the data in email for you to fill the orders.

I understand this for the most part but there seems to be a loophole that would allow a buyer to get out of paying their taxes when making a purchase.

If I a buyer realizes that the taxes are only added to the purchase price when I select shipping destination - North Carolina what is there to keep me from choosing a different location where no taxes are collected and then entering in my North Carolina shipping address in the PayPal's system when I complete the checkout. It appears that I could do this and get out of paying my taxes for a purchase.

To fix this it seems to me that the taxes either have to be set up in PayPal or your shipping address needs to be entered in my shop site (which I dont think is currently possible with SC). But even If I could have buyers enter in their shipping address I could always enter in a fake address at my shop site and change it during check out at paypal.

Am I on to something here or am I way out in left field?

Short of making a different entry for every different tax area with the tax already included in the purchase, I think you are just going to have to have faith in your potential customers' honesty and let them choose their tax area from the dropdown box you create. Apart from the fact that you will have to know the address for the customer at some stage in order to mail the order to them, so if you want to keep your eyes out for discrepancies in their original information, you could do that of course.

Or did I get that wrong and it was your shop you were hoping to change the address for? Parts of the exchange of information are handled by the payment gateway so you would not be able to make any changes in that I believe...which is all pretty much automated anyway.

But as Jo Ann says...this is something you set up in the Cart Creator.

That seems to be what I have come up with but.....

is there a way to set it up where the taxes are determined and added in PayPal?

I dont really want to depend on the honesty of others nor keep my eye out for discrepencies within the millions of orders I will have, LOL!

Well...at this point I suggest you go look very carefully at all those things you can set up in Paypal as I don't feel that I can give a definitive answer here. I am fairly convinced that you cannot do that, seeing how complex the US taxation system is. Which brings you back to the dropdown boxes. You could use one in the options as an alternative with every US state and the appropriate tax to be added to the basic purchase. The customer would not be able to move forward in the buying process until a state has been chosen if you set that as a condition...
But I have no easy answer for what happens if they choose the wrong state though!

Once again agreeing with Janys here, the tax system built into PayPal I "believe" (not concrete knowledge mind you lol) that those systems go with their PayPal Button setup that you use for ecommerce. I don't think that system works for 3rd party software unless it's prebuilt into the software and I can for sure tell you that it's not in SCC or SCC Pro.

The Honor system works pretty well for SCC programs to be honest. I mean as long as you put a paragraph above the area stating that they need to select their specific location so their order is not delayed usually is all you need. Most people don't want to delay their orders, and those that do it anyways well.... you get the emails, you see the tax amounts, you see the states and/or locations they are ordering from. Simple math from there to make sure they selected correctly. You have to look at the order that PayPal sends you anyways, so it's only a few seconds more to make sure the correct locations were selected to be sure the correct tax is charged.

It's not that hard to do, nor very time consuming and the only time it would be time consuming is if the person chose wrong and was charged wrong tax. Even if they chose a different out so state area and paid basically the same tax it's all good unless you have to report that to those states (which thank the heavens we don't have to do right now yet). If they were supposed to pay tax and didn't, or chose the wrong place and paid tax when they shouldn't have, then it creates an issue. Truly not many people are that stupid that they would pay tax when they don't have to lol.

Trust your customers and check your invoices, you'll see that there's very minimal issues with this even though it's definitely a strange setup.

I REALLY don't think that is possible... I believe that PayPal is set-up, in such a way, that when your CC Shopping Cart contents are sent over for checkout the info MUST MATCH! In other words, PP receives the cart information and starts the payment process, that info needs to stay the same. I don't remember EVER (and I've done plenty of on-line shopping over the years) being given an opportunity to edit ANY of the info. In fact, the only input I've ever seen (other than my PP username/password) is to answer the question "Are you sure you want to pay $$$ to xyz?"

BTW - If you really want to get technical about it... The Taxable address is not the ship to address but the bill to. If someone is buying as a gift, and the recipient lives in another state, but the purchaser lives in your "taxable" state then they pay the tax. If the recipient lives in the "taxable" state, but the purchase does not, then no tax should be paid.

If you really really want to get technical, all you criminals should be declaring and paying tax on everything you purchase online, no matter the state.