Custom ecommerce website development
in Boston

Tax is not a checkout line you bolt on at the end. It decides which fields the cart collects, which addresses it validates, and which documents the back office has to keep. Three things have to be settled before the build starts.

Where you owe. Obligation follows where your buyers are, not where your office is, and thresholds differ by state. A shop that crosses one has to register, collect and file there. The site's job is narrow: charge the right amount for the right address, and record what it charged.

Who does not pay. Resellers, schools, hospitals and government buyers can be exempt, and each needs a certificate on file. If the shop cannot accept one, somebody emails a PDF and an accountant applies a manual credit a week later. We build the exemption into the account instead. Upload, expiry date, a flag on the customer record, and tax suppressed automatically for that buyer.

What the documents have to show. An invoice a buyer's finance team will accept is more than an order confirmation. It carries the legal entity, tax charged per line, the exemption reference when there is one, and a number that does not change if the order is edited. Credit notes for returns need the same treatment.

Then the awkward cases. Shipping is taxable in some states and not in others. Discounts change the taxable base, and how they change it depends on whether the discount sits on the line or on the order. Digital goods have their own rules. Bundles are taxed by their components.

We connect a tax engine rather than write rate tables, because rates change and nobody wants a deployment for a rate change. What we build is the plumbing around it: address validation before the rate call, a fallback for when the service is down, and a log that shows why a given order was charged what it was. That log is the thing you will want in an audit.

Plenty of shops sell to the public and to trade buyers from the same catalogue. The two audiences want different things from the same page.

A trade buyer arrives logged in. They know the part number. They order forty units of six items and leave. A retail visitor arrives from search, needs convincing, and buys one thing. Serving both from one storefront is a question of what the site does after login. It is not a reason to build two sites.

Price is the first divide. Trade pricing comes in tiers. Sometimes the tier belongs to the customer, sometimes to a volume break inside a single order. Those prices usually must not be public. So the catalogue has to hide them until the buyer is recognised, and search results and product feeds must not leak them.

Payment is the second. Trade orders often go out on terms. The order ships, the invoice follows, the money arrives in thirty days. That needs a credit limit on the account, a hold when the limit is reached, and a way for your finance team to release an order by hand.

Then the parts only trade buyers ask for. Reordering from a previous order in two clicks. A saved list for the things they buy every month. A pasted list of part numbers straight into the cart. Quotes, where the buyer builds a basket, asks for a price, someone answers, and the accepted quote becomes an order without retyping.

Approvals turn up in larger accounts. One person builds the basket. Another signs it off. Both need to see where it is.

None of this has to ship at once. We usually start with tiered pricing, account-level catalogues and reordering, because those three cover most of the volume. Terms and approvals come next, once you know which accounts need them. What matters early is that the data model allows for it: a customer record that can carry a price list, a credit limit and more than one user.