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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Use your ip address or GPS location or address to get your location and use a sales tax api product like: https://www.avalara.com/us/en/products/integrations/avalara-api.html
Not an endorsement, just an example that companies already consider this.
It's an imperfect solution. VPNs are an issue - and even if you don't use a VPN, the API only knows the location of the ISP's servers - which can be in a different state.
My point was that, the law should leave tax inclusion in pricing as optional. There is no way to implement automatic detection cleanly, other than prompting the user to confirm their location, which is a huge annoyance - so the 'tax inclusion' rule would not make things better or more convenient.
that would very much wreak havoc with caching since you basically can't cache pricing including sales tax as it depends on your very specific location.
of course, for things like event tickets, it's the venue's location that matters for tax, so it works out to be a non-issue.
Companies have no problem doing it to comply with EU regulations which require tax to be included, so I see no technical reason why they couldnt figure it out for the US.
Fair, I admittedly don't know how one would implement it, but the sales tax data is being used by their clients for something.
Looking into it further, some states, according to Shopify's FAQ on the topic, have different rules with regards to destination-sourced vs origin-sourced sales. 🤷♂️
Maybe you could do more localized caching. Localities with different sales tax are finite and few. Cache pages based on those localities and then serve pages based on the IP of the client. It's not ideal or as optimal, but it's not that unreasonable in my mind. If it became the norm we'd build the infrastructure to sustain it.