Integrating WebSphere Commerce with a third-party tax calculation system is a key step in building and maintaining a highly secure e-commerce site with a world-wide tax calculation process. This help describes:
- The tax integration interface
- The tax integration feature, which implements the tax integration interface and communicates with a third-party tax application
For an example of a third-party tax application, refer to Taxware.
The tax integration interface
The tax integration interface retrieves tax-related information from the WebSphere Commerce database, information such as the customer's company ID, state and zip code, ship to and ship from location, billing address, and if relevant, country-related data. The interface performs these functions:
- Invoke applyCalculationUsageTIKCmd to retrieve tax-related information from the ORDERS and ORDERITEMS tables to the tax integration feature and also retrieve tax-related address for the store (seller) and customer (buyer) from the ADDRESS table
- Determine the calculation codes to be applied to the order items
- Apply the tax amounts to the order items
The tax integration feature
The tax integration feature is a set of classes used to communicate tax-related data between the tax integration interface and another tax application. The tax integration feature does the following:
- Convert formats of tax-related data for use by the third-party tax system
- Pass tax information to the relevant third-party tax application, such as jurisdiction taxability, product taxability, shipping addresses, and buyer information
- Interpret return codes to determine if the customer and product data is valid
- Receive the tax calculation from the appropriate third-party tax system and send it to the tax integration interface