Integrating WebSphere Commerce with a third-party tax calculation system is a key step in building and maintaining a highly secure e-commerce site with a world-wide tax calculation process. This help describes:
- The tax integration interface
- The tax integration feature, which implements the tax integration interface and communicates with a third-party tax application
A separate help describes the flow of tax information through the system and how to install and configure the tax integration interface.
The tax integration interface
The tax integration interface retrieves tax-related information from the WebSphere Commerce database, information such as the customer's company ID, state and zip code, ship to and ship from location, billing address, and if relevant, country-related data. The interface performs these functions:
- Invoke applyCalculationUsageTIKCmd to retrieve tax-related information from the ORDERS and ORDERITEMS tables to the tax integration feature and also retrieve tax-related address for the store (seller) and customer (buyer) from the ADDRESS table
- Determine the calculation codes to be applied to the order items
- Apply the tax amounts to the order items
The tax integration feature
The tax integration feature is a set of classes used to communicate tax-related data between the tax integration interface and another tax application. The tax integration feature does the following:
- Convert formats of tax-related data for use by the third-party tax system
- Pass tax information to the relevant third-party tax application, such as jurisdiction taxability, product taxability, shipping addresses, and buyer information
- Interpret return codes to determine if the customer and product data is valid
- Receive the tax calculation from the appropriate third-party tax system and send it to the tax integration interface
- Retrieve the recycling fee from an external tax system.