Solution to GST for Shopify Stores in Australia

By visiting several conversations on the Shopify community and while talking to a lot of Australian clients we realized there is a need for this solution that would help resolve the issue of GST calculation on Australian Shopify Stores.

We have implemented this solution on one of our Shopify merchant’s store and it worked out to be the perfect solution that they were looking for, so we are assuming that it would work for other Australian merchants too.

According to the client that we worked with, according to the law you should show the prices on the store inclusive of GST and not exclusive and in Shopify we enter prices exclusive of GST and GST or Taxes get added at the end of the checkout process on the checkout page only. This is a gap between what Australian merchants need and what Shopify is supporting. There is also a catch here, that not all products are to be charged GST on, some products are GST Free.

We found a solution for this and here’s how this worked.

All the prices uploaded to Shopify store were uploaded exclusive of GST

To the GST applicable products, we used the checkbox for taxes. For GST Free products, we unchecked the box.

Now we modified the website experience to show the correct pricing to the customers. To all the products that we have to charge taxes to, we added another 10% to it and displayed the same to the customers. Also, we added a text called “Incl. GST”

This logic was applied on to the Featured Products section on the home page, collection pages, product detail pages and the cart page.

Whereas the products that had the “Charge tax on this product” box unchecked, the prices remained as it but showed up with the label “GST Free” to the customers.

Add to cart popup was also modified to show just the new product added to cart, without any prices or GST information included.

The above part required Liquid code and JS modifications needed for the price modifications and label changes.

On the checkout page, the prices were shown exclusive of GST and the taxes were added at the end as a separate line item as per the usual Shopify process.