Canada taxes (GST/PST/HST) in Ecwid
If you’re a Canadian merchant and you’re registered for GST/HST/PST, you have to charge tax on the goods and services that you sell in your country. This can be one total tax rate (e.g., if you sell one type of products within one province), or different taxes for different products that are sold to different provinces/territories.
Ecwid allows you to set up your store in accordance with the tax rules of your sales regions. Depending on your needs, you can choose between automatic and manual taxes.
Setting up automatic taxes
The easiest way to handle taxes in Ecwid is to enable automatic taxes. This way, your store will calculate tax rates automatically based on the store and customer's location. Taxes are added to the order subtotal and shipping/delivery price at checkout after your customers enter their address.
To enable automatic taxes in your store:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → General → Store profile and add your actual company address.
Make sure you don't have any spelling mistakes or extra spaces in the address.
- Then go to Settings → Taxes and enable automatic tax calculations:
Once the automatic tax rates are enabled, your store will charge precise tax rates on each order depending on where you and your customer are located. For example, a 5% GST tax rate plus a 7% PST tax rate for customers from British Columbia, a 5% GST tax rate for customers from Northwest Territories, and a zero tax rate for customers from outside Canada (if you ship there).
By default, the same standard tax rate of your store’s region applies to all the products. If some of your products are taxed differently (e.g., they are tax-exempt), you can change the tax rate for them.
Ecwid stays up to date on the current rates, so, even if they are changed, your store will automatically use the new rates with no actions required from your side.
Setting up manual taxes
In some cases, you might need to use manual tax setup instead of the automatic taxes. Manual taxes are a highly flexible tool that allows you to set up rates to fit your business needs.
With manual taxes, you can assign different tax rates (GST, HST, and/or PST) to individual products in specific regions, choose whether a tax is applied to the order subtotal or to the subtotal and shipping, include taxes in product prices (if you need it), and more.
Consider using manual taxes if you need to set up some special taxes in specific regions, zones, or countries (e.g., your business is registered in several Canadian provinces/territories, and it affects the taxes you charge there).
After you manually set up necessary taxes for the provinces/territories you sell to, you can choose which tax to assign to a certain product in your store.
See detailed instructions on how to set up manual taxes and learn more about product-specific tax rates →
Handling tax-exempt customers
Some of your customers may be tax-exempt (e.g., they are indigenous people). You can mark them as such on the My Sales → Customers page in your Ecwid admin. This way, these customers won’t be charged taxes when buying from your store.
Learn more about tax-exempt customers in Ecwid →