Jurisdiction assets

A Jurisdictions package. A jurisdiction is a geographical region for tax or shipping purposes that represent a country or region, province or territory, postal code range, or an application-specific geo-code. In WebSphere Commerce, a geo-code is an application-specific code that represents a geographical region. Jurisdictions are specific to a particular Store, and thus the Jurisdictions package is shown as dependent on the Store. Jurisdictions are geographical regions or zones that represents a country or region, province or territory, or postal code range, to which you sell goods. Jurisdictions can be grouped to form jurisdiction groups.

Jurisdiction groups are used in the calculation of the shipping charge and tax charges on orders. That is, a jurisdiction group can be used to qualify shipping charges and tax calculation rules used. These qualified calculation rules are applicable to items in an order only if the item is being shipped to an address within one of the jurisdictions in a jurisdiction group that is associated with the calculation rule. As a result, shipping charges and tax amounts can be calculated differently depending on the shipping addresses for the different items in the order.

The following diagram illustrates how jurisdictions and jurisdictions groups fit into the Transaction Server.

In WebSphere Commerce a jurisdiction or jurisdiction group is part of a store, and is exclusive to the store or store group for which it is created. For example, if you create three jurisdictions for the store, and then delete the store, the jurisdictions are also deleted. They are not available for use by any other existing stores, or any stores we might create in the future.

However, if you create jurisdictions for a store group, jurisdictions are not deleted when the stores in that group are deleted. The jurisdictions would be available for new stores that are created in that store group.

WebSphere Commerce supports two types of jurisdictions: shipping jurisdictions and tax jurisdictions. Shipping jurisdictions can be grouped to form shipping jurisdiction groups, which qualify shipping charge calculation rules. Similarly, tax jurisdictions can be grouped to form tax jurisdiction groups, which qualify tax calculation rules.