Solidus's Zones settings allow you to create zones that your store uses to manage what taxes and shipping methods are available to customers. For example, a customer in Zone A might be charged tax, while a customer in Zone B should never be charged tax.
When you add or edit a zone, the following settings are available:
In Solidus, any regions that you ship to are grouped using zones. Zones are groups of states or countries. Zones might only have one member (such as a zone that only consists of the United States) or many members (a zone that consists of all of the non-contiguous United States: Hawaii and Alaska).
Zones allow you to set shipping rules and tax rates for specific places. They also allow you to group states or countries in a non-geographic way: for example, if you ship to all of the United States but use different carriers when shipping to Alaska and Hawaii.
Zones are especially useful if you need to comply with regional tax laws in multiple states or countries.
You can create zones that are either country- or state-based.
When you configure tax rates, you must assign each tax rate a zone. This helps you comply with local taxes for any region that you ship to.
You can only assign one zone per tax rate. However, if you have to comply with more complicated tax rules, you can create multiple tax rates for a single zone in conjunction with special tax categories, taxes with unique start or end dates, and taxes that require other special calculations.
If you are a U.S.-based company and ship within the United States, taxes vary from state to state, and many counties and municipalities have their own additional sales taxes. You should speak to a tax professional about which tax rules apply to your store.
You could also automate your U.S. tax rates by using a web service that provides
U.S. tax rates. For example, you could use
Tax Cloud
and the
solidus_tax_cloud
extension.
Talk to your development team about automating Solidus's tax calculations using an API.
Zones affect the shipping methods available to customers in certain regions. Shipping methods require at least one zone, but they could include any number of zones.
Shipping methods require a zone. Zones can be as inclusive or exclusive as the carriers you use for shipments.
For example, if you only want to allow UPS to ship packages domestically, you could set its zone to your home country only. You could be even more restrictive and make a state-based zone that only includes a few states that you wish to ship to.
No matter what countries or states your zones include, note that each shipping method requires at least one zone before it can be used.
If you use carriers that ship to multiple regions (for example, throughout North America, Europe, and Africa), you could configure your shipping methods to include multiple zones.
This feature is useful in cases when you use multiple carriers that ship to different regions. For example, if you use USPS to ship to the United States and Canada, but you use FedEx to ship to the United States and Canada as well as to Europe and Africa.