Tax-Exempt Customers

Sometimes you need to bypass sales tax for a specific customer — for example a non-profit, a wholesale account, or a customer with a valid resale certificate. This is configured per-customer, independent of their customer group.

#Marking a customer tax exempt

1. Open eCommerce → Customers in the admin panel.
2. Find the customer and click Edit.
3. Toggle Tax exempt on.
4. Save.

The change takes effect on the customer's next checkout. (If they were mid-checkout when you toggled this, their live tax recalculation picks it up automatically.)

#What happens on checkout

When a tax-exempt customer reaches the checkout summary:

• The Tax row shows $0.00 (exempt) instead of the calculated amount.
• The internal tax calculator is short-circuited — no TaxJar API call is made for that customer's tax.
• The order's stored Tax column is $0.00, and the order confirmation email shows a "Tax (exempt)" row.

The grand total is computed without tax, the same way it would be if the customer were in a no-nexus jurisdiction.

#Independence from customer groups

Tax-exempt is a separate, per-customer flag — it's not tied to any customer group:

• A Default-group customer can be tax-exempt.
• A Gold customer can be tax-exempt.
• A Wholesale customer can be NOT tax-exempt.
• Two customers in the same group can have different tax-exempt settings.

This means you don't need a separate "Tax Exempt" group; just toggle the flag on whichever customers need it.

#Audit trail

Tax-exempt status is snapshotted onto the order at the time of purchase. If you change a customer's tax-exempt setting later, past orders are not retroactively updated — the order shows the status that applied when it was placed.

The order detail page in the admin panel includes a Tax exempt badge when the order was placed by a tax-exempt customer, so you have a record of why tax was $0.00 on that order.

#Combining with customer-group discount

When a customer is both in a discount group (e.g. Gold) AND tax-exempt, both effects apply. The summary shows:

Subtotal              $100.00
Customer Group (Gold) -$20.00
Tax (exempt)            $0.00
Total                  $80.00