is there an easy way to setup sales tax on PayPal?

[windfly]

Based on my current research, PayPal offers us to setup the tax under profile: Calculate shipping and taxes, however it requires us to enter the tax rate one by one for both demestic and international rates and there is no bulk import here as well. So it could be a very tedious work. Plus we don't really know all the tax rate we should charge (we are selling online software and services).

Based on this link Best Way to Apply/Calc​ulate Sales Tax, it is recommanded by PayPal to use a third party shopping cart since PayPal doesn't offer sufficient tax support. The post is around 2011 and about 3 years old, just wonder if there are anything changed in last 3 years at PayPal suppport for Tax. Unfortunately based on my search, the answer seems no, however I just want to get confirmed.

I looked at one third party shopping cart which is listed at PayPal web site: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/shopping-cart: shopify.com. I did a trial and looked at their document, they do set up a simple default tax with one default tax for my home state NJ, but no tax for other states in US and no international tax, so we still pretty much need to do the  manual work to setup it up, see link: http://docs.shopify.com/manual/settings/taxes  .

I also looked at Chargify:https://docs.chargify.com/taxes  again, manual setup.

I looked at Zuora as well: https://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/CA_Billing_and_Payments/I_Taxes/A_Z-Tax/C_Load_Tax_Rates, they are better since bulk import is allowed, still there is no out of box tax support and we need to know all the taxes we should charge.

So I am just wondering how all those online vendors are collecting tax since the setup is so complex right now and I really doubt that

Any insight for this would be greatly appreciated.

[snowshoe]

The Tax setup in your account profile does not have a bulk upload feature.   It's a manual effort.  

In many scenarios, you only need to charge tax to residents of your state - for a better understanding, it's best to check your State's Dept of Revenue web site for the details you need to be aware of.   Some states require that you charge tax on total amount including shipping while others just the total amount and not include shipping.  Also, there can be various tax rates within your State - this is where the Zip Code feature is utilized.

When it comes to international sales - this can really be a challenge as there are VATS and tariffs to contend with - else you run into customs issues.  You really have to do your homework upfront as each country is different.

[windfly]

thanks for the answer @snowshoe  We don't have to worry about shipping since we are selling subscription based software/services.

It seems to me that PayPal should build this tax support. I just could not not image how other e-commerce vendors are handling this tax issue.  By the way, just wonder if anyone has experirence with http://developer.avalara.com/api-docs/api-reference/rest-curl/gettax, they have API for caculating tax.