Sales Tax Providers

Realtime sales tax features via Sales Tax Providers in Umbraco Commerce.

Sales Tax Providers are how Umbraco Commerce can perform real-time sales tax operations. Their job is to provide a standard interface between third-party sales tax operators and Umbraco Commerce. This is done to allow the passing of information between the two platforms.

How the integrations work is often different for each sales tax operator. The Umbraco Commerce Sales Tax Providers add a flexible interface that should work with most sales tax operators.

Example Sales Tax Provider

An example of a bare-bones Sales Tax Provider would look something like this:

[SalesTaxProvider("my-sales-tax-provider-alias")]
public class MySalesTaxProvider :  SalesTaxProviderBase<MySalesTaxProviderSettings>
{
    public MySalesTaxProvider(UmbracoCommerceContext umbracoCommerce)
        : base(umbracoCommerce)
    { }

    ...
}

public class MySalesTaxProviderSettings
{
    [SalesTaxProviderSetting]
    public string ApiKey { get; set; }

    ...
}

All Sales Tax Providers inherit from a base class SalesTaxProviderBase<TSettings>. TSettings is the type of a Plain Old Class Object (POCO) model class representing the Sales Tax Providers settings. The class must be decorated with SalesTaxProviderAttribute which defines the Sales Tax Providers alias.

The settings class consists of a series of properties, each decorated with a SalesTaxProviderSettingAttribute. These will all be used to dynamically build an editor interface for the given settings in the backoffice.

Labels and descriptions for providers and their settings are controlled through Localization entries.

Sales Tax Provider Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a Sales Tax Provider are:

• Realtime Rates - Calculating sales tax rate options for a given Order.

Realtime Rates

Real-time rates are returned by implementing the CalculateSalesTaxAsync method. To facilitate rate calculation, a SalesTaxProviderContext object is passed to this method providing useful, contextual information, including:

• Order - The Order and its items to be shipped.

• OrderCalculation - The current order calculation state.

• FromAddress - The address from which shipments will be shipped from.

• ToAddress - The address to which shipments will be shipped to.

• Settings - The sales tax provider settings are captured via the backoffice UI.

• AdditionalData - A general dictionary store for any data that may need passing between methods.

• HttpContext - A reference to the current HTTP context.

Implementors should use these details to pass to the 3rd party sales tax operators API and retrieve the sales tax costs. These should then be returned to Umbraco Commerce as a SalesTaxCalculationResult which contains an Amount property for the total sales tax amount.

Localization

When displaying your provider in the backoffice UI, it is neceserray to provide localizable labels. This is controlled by Umbraco's UI Localization feature.

Umbraco Commerce will automatically look for the following entries:

Key	Description
ucSalesTaxProviders_{providerAlias}Label	A main label for the provider
ucSalesTaxProviders_{providerAlias}Description	A description for the provider
ucSalesTaxProviders_{providerAlias}Settings{settingAlias}Label	A label for a provider setting
ucSalesTaxProviders_{providerAlias}Settings{settingAlias}Description	A description for a provider setting

Here {providerAlias} is the alias of the provider and {settingAlias} is the alias of a setting.