For certain states in the US, shipping is taxable. So if your business is located in one of these states, you are liable to pay tax on shipping. Now, how will you configure shipping taxes on your WooCommerce store? It is not a tough process to make shipping taxable on WooCommerce, if you already have taxable products on your store. In this article, we will explain how you can configure shipping taxes for WooCommerce shipping methods. If you are using ELEX DHL Shipping plugin, it will display shipping rates based on the tax rate that you choose for shipping. We will explain this aspect also in this article.
Enabling Shipping Taxes
For configuring Shipping Taxes for WooCommerce, the first thing you need to take care of is to assign a tax class for shipping. Depending on how many tax classes you have on your store, you can choose a suitable one for shipping. In the Tax settings, choose the tax class you want to associate for Shipping, ad accordingly tax will be displayed for shipping.
You have to take care of three fields in this regard.
Shipping tax class:
For this field, you will have a few options based on the available tax rate on your store. The options are:
- Shipping tax class based on cart items.
- Standard
- Reduced
- Zero rate
If you have set up any other tax rates on your store, that will also be displayed here. You can even set up a separate rate for shipping tax if required.
You also need to display how price will be displayed on your Shop pages. There are two options for this – either including tax or excluding tax.
The same options will be there for the display of prices on the Cart and Checkout pages. Based on the option that you choose, prices will be inclusive or exclusive of tax on your store.
Configuring Shipping Taxes for WooCommerce default shipping methods
WooCommerce offers three shipping methods by default. These are Free Shipping, Flat Rate and Local Pickup. Since, Free Shipping, you are not charging, tax display option won’t be applicable to it. The other two options (Flat Rate and Local Pickup) are chargeable and hence you can make it taxable as well. While setting up the rates for these two shipping methods, you can choose to make them Taxable or not.
So once, you are done configuring Shipping Taxes for WooCommerce, shipping tax will be applied based on the tax class you have selected in the Tax options settings.
For example, we have chosen “Standard” tax class, and made both Flat Rate and Local Pickup taxable. The Flat Rate is set as $20 and Local Pickup rate is $5. On the cart and checkout pages, these rates will be displayed as $24 and $6 respectively (based on the Standard tax rate of 20%)
How to add a new tax rate?
For example, if you want to add a new tax rate “Shipping tax rate”, you need to enter this in the Additional Tax Classes field.
Now you will see a new field for setting rates for this new tax class that you have added on top:
When you click on the new tax class, you will be able to enter rates for this particular tax class as well. For example, we will create the “Shipping tax rate” class with 5% tax. Once you click Save Changes, this tax class will be available to choose as Shipping Tax class.
Including shipping tax rate while using ELEX DHL Shipping plugin
With ELEX DHL Shipping plugin, you can integrate DHL services on your WooCommerce store. The plugin helps you display DHL Express rates on your WooCommerce store. By choosing a tax class for Shipping, you will be able to display DHL Express rates accordingly using the plugin.
For example, we will demonstrate two scenarios here. In the first case, we choose the Standard tax class as Shipping tax class (which is 20%).
The shipping rates displayed by the plugin is according to the standard rate: As you can see the tax amount in the price breakdown is $8.06.
In the second scenario, will change the tax class to the specific Shipping Tax rate (which is 5%). Now, you can see the tax amount in the DHL Express service price breakdown is accordingly changed. As you might have noticed, the tax amount is $2.02.
Features of ELEX DHL Shipping Plugin
Here is a quick reminder of the popular features of the ELEX DHL Shipping Plugin:
- The plugin helps you display DHL Express services and their live rates on your Cart and Checkout pages based on the weight and dimensions of the product, and shipping destination. The plugin offers an option to display the price breakdown of each service. This will actually help the customers to understand all the factors related to the price.
- You can create price adjustments to each separate service if it is relevant to your store strategy. You can make price adjustments by using a flat rate or percentage value.
- It also helps to integrate DHL Paket as well as DHL eCommerce.
- You will be able to print DHL Shipping labels by choosing the relevant service right from the WooCommerce admin itself. Postage will be paid from your DHL account automatically for the labels that you print.
- There is a separate add-on that you can install to generate and print shipping labels in bulk on a single PDF file.
- The plugin offers an option to print return labels as well. If there are multiple items in an order, you can choose the items for which you want to print return labels and print only those.
- You can print Archive airway bill using this plugin.
- The plugin helps to print Commercial Invoice. Using the DHL Paperless Trade feature, you can send the soft copy of Commercial Invoice directly to customs authorities. This will save you from printing it every time.
- You can provide shipment tracking information to your customers using this plugin. The plugin also provides a visual representation of tracking status on the Orders section of your customers. This would ensure that you are offering superior customer experience all the time on your store.
- The plugin offers automatic parcel packing as well. You can choose from three options – pack items individually, pack into boxes based on weight and dimensions, and pack based on weight. Based on your choice in the settings, the plugin will pack items in an order. The rates displayed will be based on the parcel packing option.
- It also provides an option to place a pick up request to DHL. You can enable the checkbox for this and specify the convenient pickup time for you. After this, you will receive a unique booking number.
Checkout the documentation for more details on the setting up of the plugin. If you have any queries on configuring Shipping Taxes for WooCommerce, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team.
