1. Implementing Buying Experience
  2. Use Taxation Process

Use Taxation Process

Buying Experience doesn't calculate or manage taxes. It comes with a prebuilt integration with Avalara AvaTax for Communications to calculate sales and use taxes for products and services purchased by your customers.

You can use the Avalara tax integration with TM Forum Open APIs to retrieve the tax amount based on tax codes and customer service address. The application connects to Avalara by default. If you use a different tax application or a custom tax engine, you can integrate that with the application by using CX Industries Framework.

Buying Experience uses your tax application to calculate taxes for every purchase. The offers purchased can include products with different tax implications; for example, a bundle with a set-top box and a sign-up fee. Additionally, they can be provisioned across multiple tax territories. When your customer initiates the checkout process and submits an order, Buying Experience passes the information required to calculate taxes to the tax application. This includes the purchase cost, customer service address, advice of charge, tax code, and tax exemption code (if applicable). It passes the information to the tax application by using the taxation adapter in CX Industries Framework. The tax application first validates the address and if it's valid, it calculates the total tax amount and sends it back to Buying Experience. The response can include individual tax components, such as the sales tax calculated for both the state and county.

Here are the scenarios where this application calls the tax application:

  • To show tax inclusive or exclusive price of all offers in the quote to the buyers.

  • To show total tax on purchases to customers before they submit the purchase request.

For bill payments, the billing system calculates the tax amount for each bill based on the taxation criteria used in Digital Experience for Communications. Use the same tax application and a single taxation gateway instance in both Buying Experience and the billing system. This ensures that all the taxes are calculated using a single instance.