User's Manual

Merchant User Manual and Integration Guide May, 2005 83
9
Calculating Shipping, Handling,
and Tax
You can set up your PayPal account to automatically calculate and charge shipping and sales
tax (also called “value added tax”).
Getting Started
To view or modify your sales tax and shipping charges:
1. Log in to your PayPal account at
https:www.paypal.com.
2. Click the Profile subtab of the My Account tab.
3. Click the Sales Tax or the Shipping Calculation link in the Selling Preferences column.
Sales or Value Added Tax Collection
You can charge your customers tax by choosing a Country (such as, United Kingdom) or State
(such as, California) from the Country and U.S. State drop-down menus, and entering your
Tax Rate for that state in the Tax Rate field. All your customers who reside in the country or
state you select are automatically charged the tax rate you choose. You can specify a different
tax rate for each U.S. state and any of the listed countries.
There are radio buttons that allow you to apply tax to an item only, or to an item and any
shipping and handling costs, as you desire.
Click Save to save your changes.
NOTE: If you are entering the rate for a U.S. state, ensure that the Country drop-down menu is
set to United States.
Overriding Tax Setting Per Transaction
The tax variable is an optional transaction-based tax override variable with which you can set
a flat tax amount on a single transaction regardless of the buyer’s location.
For more information about this and other variables, see Appendix A, “HTML Samples.”