We will now see how setting a tax class for a product affects the overall price.
- First, let's browse to the shoe example, which we added in the previous chapter, on storefront. Notice that the price is exactly the same as we had set in the administration panel in the previous chapter.
- Let's open the administration panel and choose the Catalog | Products menu.
- Let's Edit the shoe item on our store.
- We browse to the Data tab, find, and change the Tax Class property to the Taxable Goods option. Do not forget to Save the changes.
- We again browse to the shoe on the storefront and see that the price of the shoe has changed. The price increase is exactly the percentage of UK VAT rate, which was defined as 17.5%.
An OpenCart store is installed by default according to the local settings for the United Kingdom and the products are shown on the online store with the inclusion of tax rate by default. This can be confusing for an international visitor. For example, a potential customer from Germany would see taxed UK price on the item properties page by default, which is a bad e-business practice.
Note
On the other hand, remember that some specific countries can forbid showing prices without taxes for the customer. In this case, we have to show the tax value as well.
In a normal situation, we should better show the price of an item without tax rate on item pages and include the calculated tax rate on the final checkout screen.