Selling products to the USA

If you sell your products to the USA, there are some tax aspects that need to be considered. Since this is a sale outside the EU, no (German) VAT is due. This means that you list the products as net and no VAT is charged. In the USA, other tax laws apply. The so-called "sales tax" applies there, which is charged at a different rate in each US state. In order to implement this tax requirement in Shopware, some adjustments are necessary, which we will show you in this tutorial.

Step 1: Create a new customer group

To display the net prices correctly in the shop, create a new customer group for US customers. Navigate to Settings > Customer Groups > Add Customer Group. In the mask, you assign a name for the customer group and select Net as the tax representation. This will display net prices in the shop.

Step 2: Setting the language and localisation

In order for the storefront to be displayed in an American notation, you can create the language American English, which refers to the American ISO code and local. You can find the language setting in Settings > Shop > Language. To do this, add a new language and assign it the local "English, United States" and the ISO code "en-US".

Make sure that you set the language before you install the language package. Otherwise you will not be able to assign the ISO code to the default language English.

Step 3: Assign the customer group to the sales channel

Assign the US customer group to your sales channel under Sales Channels > Customer Group. Also, select the created US language within the Language section.

Step 4: Configure tax rates

In order to calculate the appropriate tax rates (sales tax) for the respective states, you can adjust the default tax rate. Settings > Taxes > Default rate.

Country (1): Select "USA" as the country here.
Valid for (2): Select the option "Individual States" here. This automatically opens a new menu item under (3) where you can select the states in a dropdown list. The prerequisite is that the states are already stored in the settings of the country.
States (3): In order to enter a tax rate, you should check which US state has which tax rate. In this example, several states have the same tax rate of 6%. Simply select the states for which the tax rate is to be calculated. If a state has an exclusive tax rate, you must create it individually. The procedure is the same as for multiple states.
Tax rate (4): Enter the tax rate here.

Step 5: Set Snippets set

In the storefront, the tax is shown as "VAT" by default. To display a different designation, such as "Sales tax", you can adapt the snippet checkout.summaryTax. To do this, create a new text module set and adapt the snippets (1) + (2) there. 

Storefront View