Discount and Tax Engine updates

1 | published by Aleksey B. on Wednesday, May 12, 2010

We spent an entire week preparing a large-scale update of the Discount and Tax Engines. Taxes are calculated more accurately now, and discount management is more intelligent. We wanted to tell you about the updates before we publish them. Below is a list of the most important improvements.

Tax Engine improvements

Taxes are now calculated based on subtotals. Before these updates, taxes were calculated for each cart item separately. The new method is more precise.
Taxes always take into account discounts. We explored competitor offerings, and found that even with the most popular of them taxes are not always affected by discounts. If you bought a product with a discount, the tax amounts would not be reduced in some systems and in some circumstances. For example, if you purchased an expensive TV set with a 25% discount, taxes would be calculated based on the original price, not the discounted price. Now with LemonStand you will always have correct tax values.

Discount Engine improvements

Cart-level price rules now assign discounts to each cart item individually. If you use the "Discount the shopping cart subtotal by X percent" price action in your discount configuration, LemonStand will now distribute the discount amount among all items in the cart.
As a consequence of the previous item, discount concepts in LemonStand orders have changed. Before the update it was an "amount which you need to add to the subtotal to get the order total". Now order subtotal includes discounts, and the order discount field just displays the total amount of discounts applied by catalog and cart price rules.
It is very easy to apply discounts for existing orders in the Administration Area. On the Discounts tab you can click the Enter discount manually link and enter a discount value as a fixed amount or as a percentage value. LemonStand will distribute the amount among the order items and then re-calculate taxes.

Implications on existing orders

We already have some LemonStand-based stores which are taking live orders. The update will not affect reports or any elements of existing orders. No updates are needed in pages or partials code. However if you are going to edit an existing order which has some discount applied, we recommend that you save the order details somewhere before you begin and then apply the price rules using the Apply price rules link on the Discounts tab of the Edit Order page. Alternatively, you can assign discounts individually for each order item.

If you use the discount engine, we recommend that you check whether your rules work as supposed after the update. Just make a couple of test orders. Please contact us if you think that something went wrong.

Striving to make LemonStand an ideal platform

As mentioned above, many of our competitors have had issues related to tax and discount calculation for years. It has ultimately resulted in problems for the merchant in may cases.

We identified the problem during our beta testing and solved it quickly. We are committed to delivering a mature and intelligent eCommerce platform and fixing all that is wrong with the shopping cart industry.

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