VAT Inclusive Free Shipping Limit

[Jemski]

Please help! This is causing a major headache and losing us sales.

We retail a mixture of standard and zero rated VAT items. We want to offer free shipping over a certain cart value. This is a retail site and we don't sell outside of Europe so everyone pays VAT. We want to set free shipping on a VAT inclusive limit but there doesn't seem to be any way of selecting this - Actinic automatically uses the VAT exclusive price to figure out if the free shipping limit is reached.

We are getting a lot of complaints from confused customers who are not used to having to think about VAT ex. prices and so just see us offering free shipping and then not giving it.

I see this issue has been brought up many times over the years. Is it still on the wish list or has something been done about it? At worst, is there any coding change that can be made so that Actinic uses the VAT inclusive price?

[leehack]

Why don't you either specify free delivery on orders over £x.. excluding vat or state the order amount including vat and put the net amount of that amount in as the shipping trigger.

[Jemski]

Hi Lee. Thanks for the reply. I have thought about these and may well have to fall back on one of them. Unfortunately either way is a bit of a fudge and will end up confusing customers as the advertised free shipping value will rarely tally with the actual free shipping value. If it were me shopping I'd be thinking "do I really want to give my credit card details to a company who can't even calculate free shipping properly".

I just don't see why you can't choose whether the qualifying value is inclusive or exclusive of VAT. You can do it with discounts so it's not like the coding would be unachievable or even unprecedented. (As a work around, I had actually been thinking of applying the free shipping as an order level discount instead of using the Actinic free shipping function. Unfortunately that wouldn't work as we do not offer free shipping outside the UK.)

[leehack]

If free shipping is triggered when i have spent £100 or more, then if you add £85.10 in as the trigger amount, i should get free shipping.

Likewise if you specify that i need to spend £85 excluding vat to get free shipping, i can easily see in the shopping cart when i have achieved that also.

I'm not picturing what doesn't tally or what is confusing to customers with that scenario? It's not great i agree, however the chances of you seeing this fixed in the next 5 years are slim, so it's a case of doing the best you can with what you've got.

[Jemski]

Hi Lee, yes, I get the maths and if we only sold standard rated items it would be easy but about 50% of our sales are for zero rated items and most orders contain a mixture of zero and standard rated items. From the complaints the main confusion seems to be that retail customers aren't really used to the idea of having to think about ex. VAT prices. So when we say "it's free delivery over £100 ... well acutally it's £117.50 or somewhere in between depending on how many of your items are standard rated for VAT" they think we're pulling a fast one.

Imagine how confusing it would be for shoppers if TESCO said 5p a litre off your fuel when you spend £50 instore excluding VAT. You'd need an accountant just to go shopping VAT ex. prices are only really of any interest to businesses, they are distracting and irrelevant to retail customers.

As you say, it hasn't been fixed in the last 5 years so I don't suppose it will be fixed in the next 5. I just thought I'd ask in case I'd missed something or someone knew a work around. You never know, this might even be the post that breaks the camel's back and makes Actinic think it's time to sort the issue out and give us the choice of using inc. or ex. VAT.

[leehack]

You never know, this might even be the post that breaks the camel's back and makes Actinic think it's time to sort the issue out and give us the choice of using inc. or ex. VAT.

LOL Jem, good one, time to get up and go to work now.

The difference to shopping at Tesco in your example is that you do not have a view cart button beside you at all times, whereas the actinic shopping cart does and it is just one figure you need to look at (sub total), so not as confusing as you're making out IMO.

[TraceyHand]

The difference to shopping at Tesco in your example is that you do not have a view cart button beside you at all times

LOL
that's not such a bad idea actually!

[Mike Hughes]

As you say, it hasn't been fixed in the last 5 years so I don't suppose it will be fixed in the next 5.

What version of Actinic are you using?

With V9 you can specify that your prices are VAT inclusive in which case I would expect that 'free shipping over £x' would work they way you want it to.

(or have I gone into some strange time warp where V9 doesn't exist?).

Mike

[leehack]

(or have I gone into some strange time warp where V9 doesn't exist?).

Good point, i guess it exists from 9.03 onwards .

It will be interesting to see if they have stretched the VAT fixes to this area too, personally I expect not.

[Jarvis]

Here's one to get the brains of the Developers at Actinic Towers working.

How about a button that vistors can click so that they can choose to have prices displayed as either VAT Inclusive or VAT Exclusive?

[Nadeem]

Hi Jarvis,

To be honest I haven't seen that feature on many other popular online stores, Anyway that would be hard to do with static html pages, so it would be a wishlist item.

Kind Regards