Displaying prices

Solidus allows you to display prices in a flexible way to comply with your local tax regulations.

For example, in most countries that use value-added taxes (VAT), prices in a store's frontend need to include any taxes that will be charged to the customer.

Set up price display for value-added taxes (VAT)

In order to comply with VAT-style tax regulations, you first need to set up the tax rates, tax categories, and zones that your store will use in production.

After you have set up and tested your store's tax configuration options, you can update any of your existing products and variants with the "Rebuild VAT prices" checkbox selected.

Solidus can then proceed to calculate the correct consumer prices for each country with included_in_price VAT rates. It also generates a fallback "export" price, where the price's country_iso is nil. New products will behave as if the "Rebuild VAT prices" checkbox were selected.

If you update your tax configuration in the future, you will need to rebuild your VAT prices again.

Any product can have several prices for the same country. By default, Solidus always uses the most recently updated price.

VAT is always included in backend prices

In countries that use VAT, administrators expect backend prices to include their country's VAT.

If you use the solidus_backend gem for store administration, all your prices are displayed including any valued-added tax (VAT) valid for the current country.

You can change the configured country represented in your admin using the Spree admin_vat_country_iso configuration value. For example, if the store administrator lives in Germany, you could change the configured value to the ISO code for Germany:

    
      Spree::Config.admin_vat_country_iso = "DE"

    
  

Anticipate the customer's tax jurisdiction

When a customer first browses your store, you may not know which tax jurisdiction they live in. You can choose to make an assumption about your customers's location using the Spree::Store model's cart_tax_country_iso property.

The cart_tax_country_iso property sets a default location for customers depending on the store that they are browsing. For example, if you have both a us.store.com and a de.store.com and the customer is browsing the us.store.com, your customer is more likely to be in the United States.

Using the cart_tax_country_iso property can help you comply with tax jurisdictions where it is required to display VAT as part of the price.

Administrators can configure these values for a storefront using the "Default currency" and "Tax Country for Empty Carts" settings on the Settings -> Store page in the solidus_backend admin.

Valued-added tax and price are intricately connected. If your store requires custom tax and pricing logic, you can change Solidus's pricing behavior by creating a custom Spree::Config.variant_price_selector_class along with a fitting Spree::Config.pricing_options_class. See the price_selector specifications for the standard price selector , as well as the pricing_options specifications for the standard pricing options for more information.