How to handle multiple shipping origins and their tax calculations in magento 1.9?

Question

I'm facing an issue related to Magento 1.9.

Let me talk a bit about the context, we are part of a franchising business and each franchise works like an independent business.

In Magento, we can create a website -> store -> store-view per each franchise and manage them individually but found a problem related to taxes and shipping.

Magento only allows for one shipping origin but in our case, we have one shipping origin per franchise/website since each franchise will ship its goods like an independent business.

What plugin/service/workflow would you recommend to handle multiple shipping origins keeping in mind that we have to calculate taxes based on this multiple shipping origins? (this are USA taxes).

Many thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You can set a shipping origin globally or per website using Current Configuration Scope under System > Configuration > Shipping Settings > Origin. As you mentioned, this can't be done by store view in a single website. I recommend creating a separate website for each franchise, otherwise you'll have to write some custom code.

There are several tax extensions that should be able to handle multiple shipping origins, including TaxJar. We look at the shipping origin based on the current store and pass it on to our sales tax API to calculate tax.

Answer 2

I know this is an old question, but for future readers:

Being able to edit the origin country per store can easily be achieved by adjusting the configuration XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:module:Magento_Config:etc/system_file.xsd">
    <system>
        <section id="shipping">
            <group id="origin" showInStore="1">
                <field id="country_id" showInStore="1"/>
            </group>
        </section>
    </system>
</config>

I've tested this, and when 'Tax Calculation Based On' is set to 'Shipping Origin', the country set per store in this config setting is taken into account.