Tax integration
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 is done through the tax integration feature and its tax integration API, a set of task commands called by the order component to communicate with the third-party tax calculation system when the tax integration feature is enabled.
Third-party tax calculation systems are expected to enable the integration by implementing the tax integration API. An example of this is Taxware and its TaxwareLink package.
The tax integration feature
The tax integration feature is essentially a set of calculation methods pluggable into the Calculation Framework to divert tax calculation to a third-party system through the tax integration API. When the Calculation Framework requests the tax amounts of an order and its orderitems to be calculated, these calculation methods will extract from the order all information relevant to tax calculation and pass them to the third-party tax calculation system through the tax integration API.
The Calculation Framework will then apply the tax amounts returned by the third-party tax calculation system to the order and its orderitems. Through the tax integration API, the tax integration feature can also request the third-party tax calculation system to audit tax during order processing.
Tax Integration API
The tax integration API consists of the following task commands:
TaxIntegrationOrderCmd
TaxIntegrationOrderItemCmd
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