Commerce Cloud uses a fallback method for calculating taxes when it cannot connect to your tax processor’s web service in the event of an outage. The fallback tax logic automatically applies a default tax rate (that you set with the Admin API) to all orders if a specified number of calls to the tax processor fail within a specified time span. This prevents errors at the tax calculation step of order processing and allows orders to progress to the payment processing step.

Note: During the initial configuration of your environment, Oracle sets certain settings that trigger the fallback tax calculation, including the number of consecutive failed tax calls, the time span over which to count failed tax calls, and the time period after which Commerce Cloud should try calling the tax processor’s service again.

Commerce Cloud uses the fallback logic to calculate taxes only when calls to the tax processor fail. That is, when the tax processor’s web service responds to a call with a 500-level status code. Fallback tax calculation is not used when any other type of response is received. For example, if your Commerce Cloud tax settings contain the wrong postal code for your tax nexus, the tax processor will reply with an error, but that error will not trigger fallback tax calculation logic.