Following this thread!

I have been going back and forth on this topic with both Stripe and Docebo and am quite frustrated trying to get a straight answer. Docebo tells me that my Stripe has to be set up to receive taxes (it is) and it’s on them, and Stripe tells me that it is on Docebo and how they do the code call to the payment gateway. I haven’t been able to find a solution that doesn’t involve paying more money for a third party integration even though we were promised that we would be able to do this when we signed the contract with Docebo. 

If anyone has any ideas or can offer how they have been doing this, I’d love to hear it!

Thanks!

Were either of you able to come to a resolution on this issue? Our company is going through the same struggle right now and are being given the run around by the payment gateway and Docebo. 

Hi Imilla -- Unfortunately, no. We’ve not been able to find a good way to resolve e-commerce through Docebo and it’s a huge disappointment. 

May I ask what you all have been doing to stay tax compliant during the last 7 months or so? Is the company paying the tax liability for the customer? Our ERP system can accurately tax the product, but we are unable to get it do that in Docebo. 

I realize this doesn’t really address the root issue here but I remember many years ago when I was running a small side business in the evenings with my spare time. *Spare time... LOL.

I had chosen at that time to price everything as tax included so that customers paid exactly what was quoted or what they saw advertised.

As we progress through our onboarding - and reading this thread - it brings me back to those days and I wonder about that idea as we set up our own e-commerce soon.

Hi there -- we’re doing what Greg suggested above.  We roll the tax into the price so they pay a fixed price no matter where they are. 

This is also a frustration for us, along with how the “buyer” information in the cart isn’t well-validated. causing problems with CyberSource payment processing.

To address this I’ve been looking at alternative carts.  One of the more interesting solutions come from two vendors who are MORs (merchants of record): Paddle and Fastspring. They act as a reseller of sorts, so they become responsible for not only the tax calculations but also the remittance to tax authorities.  They pay you after they take their cut.  They charge a higher percentage fee than normal to provide this service, so you’d have to calculate what your cost overhead would be for handling the taxes yourself vs. outsourcing it to them.  I also haven’t gone deep enough into their technical documents to know if/how these would work with Docebo since there are no official “connectors” for them.  I’d be happy to post a follow-up when I’ve dug into these some more.

The more traditional way to go would be to replace the cart with something like Shopify, but the current Shopify connector is going away.  What seems to be happening is a move toward an automation solution with Workato/Docebo Connect where Docebo supplies Workato recipes that you configure.  My *guess* is that you’d have to mimic the existing Shopify connector’s functionality that essentially restricts course sales/enrollments to “admin only”, with the API doing the admin work of enrollments when someone buys a course through whatever shopping cart solution you create (and manually maintain).  Sales taxes are then handled by whatever functionality is built-in or by an add-on module--something like WooCommerce and one of these extensions.

I asked Docebo if improvements to the built-in cart are on the roadmap, but was told that a public roadmap won’t be released for a couple more months.  It makes it hard to know whether to wait for Docebo or blaze a new trail.

If anyone has gone down the “roll your own” road, please let us know what did and didn’t work for you. 

This is an issue for us, too. We’ve gone back and forth with our rep about this topic as we believe it should be part of the cart process. I am going to submit an idea if anyone wants to give it an upvote. 

I’m happy to be your first upvote!  

I have also received the same response about the payment processor being responsible.  I can tell you our payment processor can accommodate the tax, but the payment submission form for CyberSource has nothing sales-tax related (and shouldn’t the tax be displayed in the cart before you get to payment submission?). 

There are two Merchant of Record (MOR) companies (Paddle and Fastspring) that can act as resellers for you--and then they’re responsible for sales tax collection. The problem is that they don’t seem to have a way of integrating with Docebo (at least not without injecting JS).  The other way is to use a plug-in provider like Avalara or TaxJar.  I do not know of a way to get any of these solutions to work with the Docebo cart in its current form.

If you change over to a different shopping cart that has Avalara or TaxJar already plugged in (or some other solution), Docebo has the Connect product to facilitate the communication between systems, but I don’t know how much integration there is with things like product descriptions..  If anyone has completed one of these integrations, please share!

​Ed

So some information that I received from Stripe is on these links:

• Stripe + Docebo: https://help.docebo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020125459-Configuring-Stripe-for-the-E-Commerce-App
  • Looks like you'll need to leverage their 'Stripe SCA' version in order to leverage Stripe Tax 

• Stripe Tax:
  • Overview: https://stripe.com/docs/tax
  • Tax Codes: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/tax-codes
  • Customer Locations: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/customer-locations

Also, for anyone utilizing Authorize.net, they don’t have a way of placing sales tax so I would avoid them as a payment gateway all together. 

Has anyone done this yet to describe how the tax is implemented in the cart?  Or is it added on at the payment step after buyer submits the order?

We still really need a built-in tax setup with the Docebo cart and payment services like CyberSource.