by Jim » Fri May 17, 2013 12:59 pm
ShopSite works with zipcodes only not town names or tax jurisdictions. You enter the zipcodes that have the same tax into a single field using the ? character as a wild card, for example 84??? would match any zipcode from 84000 to 84999 and 8412? would match any code form 84120 to 84129. When the shopper enters their zipcode into the shopping cart the software will look through the tax table and match their zipcode to one of the entries in the table and compute the tax based on the rate assigned to that group of zip codes.
It really shouldn't be too hard to set the table up if you have the data provided by the state and it contains zipcodes for the various areas. I know we have a number of merchants in Washington who are using the Tax by Zip method and it works fine for them.
The only other option is to use Avalara's AvaTax which also uses the zipcode for its initial tax calculation and then when the shopper enters their full address another calculation is done to see if it changes the tax at all. Avalara Avatax works great but ther is a charge for transactions run through their system.