Tax calculation inputs

Understand how automated tax calculations work.

To compute taxes, Digital River uses a wide range of data points. The following table lists attributes that affect both initial tax estimates and final tax amounts:

Tax-relevant attribute	Resource	Notes
taxCode	SKU	The designated tax code of the product or service. Digital River uses the value you provide to classify the product as digital or physical.
shipFrom	Checkout	Represents the address from which the physical product is shipped. A customer must provide this information to successfully place an order that contains a physical product.
shipTo	Checkout	Represents an order's ship to address. Digital River uses this data to compute taxes on physical goods and (when the attribute is specified) on digital goods. A customer must provide this information to successfully place an order that contains a physical product. The data can also be inherited from a Customer object by specifying a customer identifier in the Checkout.
shipping	Customer	Represents a customer's ship to address. Digital River uses the data to compute taxes on physical goods and (when the attribute is specified) on digital goods. You can pass the object's data to a Checkout by specifying a customer identifier. This fulfills the requirement to provide a shipTo value for physical goods even when the value is not explicitly set in the Checkout.
purchaseLocation	Checkout	Use a purchase location when customers have yet to supply either the Checkout's shipTo value that is required to successfully submit an order for physical goods or the billing address that is necessary for digital goods.
sources[].owner.address	Customer	Represents a billing address for a payment method and is used to compute taxes on digital orders. You set the address when creating a source. However, when provided, the Checkout'sshipTo value or the Customer's shipping value takes precedence over the billing address.
taxIdentifiers	Customer	Allows qualified customers to purchase zero-rated goods.
taxCertificates	Customer	Allows qualified customers to make tax exempt purchases.
type	Customer	Providing a customer type allows you to support tax exemption and zero-rated purchases for business customers. In most cases, setting the value to individual nullifies the use of tax identifiers and tax certificates for tax computation purposes. These attributes, however, may still be used for reporting and invoicing.
customerType	Checkout	This attribute is equivalent to the type attribute in the Customer resource. However, the value set in the Checkout always overrides the one in the Customer object.
taxInclusive	Checkout	Lets Digital River know whether to subtract taxes from or add taxes to the price you specify for each SKU when describing items in a Checkout.

Tax estimation and computation workflow

The following provides a high-level overview of how Digital River uses a SKU's tax code to classify a product as digital or physical.