What Magento Merchants need to know about sales tax in 2017

Where are we headed with remote sales tax legislation? Repost from Avalara

If tax-free online shopping ends in 2017, what are the implications to your business? Classy Llama and Avalara want to make sure cart compliance makes your list for year-end planning meetings.

This blog post will give you a quick snapshot of information concerning the Sales Simplification Act and what it means for your business. Our free eBook: The Online Sales Tax Showdown provides a more detailed look at the sales tax situation for online retailers today, the proposals in play, and their likely impact for retailers of all types and sizes next year.

The issue of remote sales tax remains a divisive one among federal lawmakers. The 2015 Online Sales Simplification Act (OSSA) draft never became a bill, and OSSA 2016 exists in draft form only. OSSA could go the way of the Marketplace Fairness Act and the Remote Transactions Parity Act (thus far, nowhere). Or it could drum up support for the No Regulation without Representation Act of 2016, an anti-remote sales tax bill that was introduced in July.

Yet change in remote sales tax policy doesn’t necessarily depend on federal legislators. Numerous states have enacted affiliate and click-through nexus laws, under which certain remote retailers trigger a sales and use tax obligation through affiliate relationships and/or links on websites owned by state residents. In addition, new economic nexus laws in Alabama and South Dakota are challenging the physical requirement precedent upheld by the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota. Both states are being sued over their policies and both hope to take their cases to Supreme Court, which they hope will overturn Quill and grant states the authority to tax certain remote sales.

Instead of challenging or expanding the definition of nexus, Colorado and Vermont have imposed use tax reporting requirements on remote retailers to attempt to increase use tax compliance. States are entitled to tax revenue from taxable remote sales — when sales tax isn’t collected by a retailer, consumers are supposed to remit use tax to the state. Yet individual use tax compliance is low, and enforcement is difficult. It remains to be seen whether the policies in Colorado and Vermont will be effective.

In short, a majority of states want remote sales tax revenue, and lawmakers will continue to push for it in state capitols and on Capitol Hill. There is no guarantee their efforts will be successful; if they are, what remote sales tax compliance will look like from state to state is unknown.

For a more in-depth look at this topic, download a copy of The Online Sales Tax Showdown, a special report by Internet Retailer with support from Avalara that looks at what federal sales tax legislation could mean for US retailers and other sellers.

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User Acceptance Testing a Magento 2 Site

During our website builds, some of our clients have asked about our quality assurance process. We commonly get questions like “What do you check during testing?” and “What should our testing include?” We can give answers to the first question during the course of the project. In response to the second question, we recently wrote a document that provides an initial set of answers. A primary factor that influenced the direction of the document is that we’ve found that a merchant tends to focus on the features of a site that are unique to them, while overlooking aspects that are standard or only lightly customized. And having a published procedure which we can give to clients means they can get started sooner with their testing because they have a roadmap to follow. A benefit of an earlier start on user acceptance testing is more available time for changes and bug fixes prior to launching.

The first version of the procedure guides a merchant through testing a “happy path” through the site. A “happy path” is a path through a system or site where given normal, expected inputs, everything works as expected without errors or exceptions. Using a “happy path” approach doesn’t ensure that a site is bug-free since things do go wrong in the real world. Our internal testing process is much more comprehensive and detailed, and hopefully, we have delivered a nearly defect-free site to the client. Our intention with the procedure is to achieve two objectives during user acceptance testing:

  1. To prompt user acceptance testing when there’s enough time to act on the client’s feedback without delaying the launch.
  2. To ensure that the client sees what most of the site looks like, and experiences how the key features of the site work.

The Scenario

The scenario we chose to emulate with the test is that of a first-time guest user of the site. We thought about the actions that a first-time visitor would most likely take, and created a diagram depicting what that user might do.

Note that the above diagram isn’t a rigorously correct process flow diagram. It was sufficient for the purpose of guiding the writing of the test procedure. And it probably includes more actions than a typical first-time guest user would actually do. It can be thought of as a “happy path with detours”. We wanted to cover those behaviors that were highly likely to be done by first-time visitors, although any single user is unlikely to do all of them.

Test Coverage

The procedure covers the following aspects of testing the store as a first-time guest user.

  • Testing with both desktop and mobile devices.
  • Visiting the homepage.
  • Adding a product to the cart from a “featured products” or “hot sellers” block.
  • Navigating to a category page and adding a product on it to the cart.
  • Searching for a product and adding a product to the cart from the search results.
  • Adding a product to the cart from a product details page, including at least one product with options.
  • Viewing the minicart and using its features.
  • Viewing the shopping cart and using its features.
  • Checking out.
  • Reviewing the order confirmation.
  • Opening an account.
  • Using account page features.
  • Viewing the 404 page.

The Document

The document includes step by step instructions and many screenshots so that it is usable by testers who are new to Magento-based sites. It is available as a PDF file.

Classy Llama’s clients will be provided with the document at the appropriate point in their project and may also obtain it by contacting their project manager and requesting a copy of User Acceptance Testing a Magento 2 Site.

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