added address amount buyer cart changes chef code country customer don due dvds entered error handle happy info integrate lot merchants option orders payment paypal paypal-pro php refund regularly sale sales selling send ship shipping shopping side situation standard tax update url wanted zipcode

I'm just now selling online for the first time, so far, so good. On my third sale with sales tax, though, a customer entered a non-taxable zip in her cart, and then on paypal, she entered a taxable ship to address. It was great that e-junkie made the potential tax fraud indication so noticeable on our sale notification.

My question is, how do people normally handle this situation? If I ask the customer to pay the tax, do I just tell her to send me a paypal payment for $1.95 (the amount of tax due)? Or should I just let it slide and pay it myself (assuming that's legal), and don't worry about it unless it happens a lot? (Does this happen a lot? Are there people out there "gaming" taxes on e-commerce shopping carts all the time?)

A third option is to refund her original sale, and ask her to go back and start over with a new sale.

I don't want to alienate a potentially happy customer, but if this is the kind of thing that happens a lot in e-commerce, I guess I'll need to have a strategy for dealing with it regularly.

thanks,
Joe

Hey Joe, I'll let other merchants get to your concern about how to handle the situation, but I just wanted to inform that this kind of situation is only possible with PayPal standard. In case of PayPal Pro, Authorize.Net and Google Checkout, we have several merasures which either don't let the buyer update the zip or we update the sales tax and shipping if the zip changes.

Thanks for this info, Chef. Followup question regarding the e-junkie side of things: I am planning to integrate your orders with the wholesaler of our DVDs using PHP - when this situation occurs, does your 'send to URL' output contain an error code that my PHP script would be on the lookout for?

We've added two paramters to the callback -

zipcode_mismatch
country_mismatch

they'll only be present in case of a mismatch and will be set to true.

:) thanks.