Two Software Releases for VirtueMart

We just released VirtueMart Flex Tax, and Authorize.net SIM Flex Payments for VirtueMart. So what is new and special about these add-ons?

VirtueMart Flex Tax started out as a means of calculating Canadian Taxes. There is another option out there for this, but it is clunky, overly complicated, and requires modification of way too many site files (this makes sustainability difficult). The use is also overly complicated and unintuitive. We also had US clients that needed VM to do things that it did not do. VM Flex Tax was designed to elegantly handle a range of tax computation limitations in VirtueMart.

Rather than developing a “Canadian Tax Patch” for VirtueMart, we developed a Flex Tax add-on that addresses all the needs we saw in VM. Instead of saying “We need to handle Canadian Taxes” or “We need a solution for Florida or Chicago Taxes”, we started with functional needs. We identified four needs types:

1. VirtueMart did not allow multiple level taxes. In other words, you could not do a Country Tax, and then separate State Taxes, and then City Taxes to easily and elegantly handle many levels of taxes without having to set up combined taxes for each location (some laws require a breakdown in tax readout on checkout). So we wanted to be able to set a global Country tax, then State or Province taxes which would add to the Country tax, and then a City tax if needed, so we had a flexible three tiered computation.
2. VirtueMart did not allow proper control over how the taxes were charged. It offered “By Vendor” and “By Purchaser”. Problem with that, is some locations require that taxes be charged by the billing address, some by the delivery address, and some by both (Florida and several other states do this). So we expanded those options to cover all the bases.
3. VirtueMart did not handle shipping taxes in any way that was actually useful for most store owners. Most states that charge tax on shipping require that it be computed on the same basis as the product taxes, but VM was simply not capable of being bullied into this basic logic (it only allows you to set a single tax rate for shipping, and won’t charge a different rate by location of the buyer – and it only allows you to charge tax on shipping at all if the tax computation is set to Vendor based taxing!). So we added in the function to choose “Same as Product” for shipping tax computation. Because we did not want to lose any function (in case anyone actually needed the convoluted method that VM currently provided) we also added in an option to preserve the previous function.
4. VirtueMart had a single tax readout on checkout. Many areas require a breakdown of the taxes charged in the readout. Previous coders who provided solutions for this required that you use THEIR VM template to achieve this function. Our coder (brilliant guy, really!) did not use that method, but coded the function into the core files, so it works with any template.

This new add-on provides function for a wide variety of situations, in the simplest possible manner. It was designed to allow you to pick and choose the functions you need, so that you can use them in almost any combination, to meet the needs of  US and Canadian taxes, pretty much no matter where you are.

Our second release is the Authorize.net SIM Flex Payment Module. Authorize.net offers two ways of processing payments. The standard method collects CC data on YOUR site, then transmits it to AN. This provides PCI compliance headaches for small merchants, because the security burden rests squarely on them. The AN SIM method of processing payments transfers the customer to AN before any CC data is entered in, meaning that AN assumes the risk for all PCI compliance (this is the same method used by PayPal standard). This is a huge financial relief for very small merchants.

We discovered while researching options for this kind of module, that many other CC Gateways offer “Authorize.net Emulation Mode”.  This means that we could code a single module, and have it work for more than one gateway. We have simply added new Gateways as our clients have requested. It currently supports:

• Authorize.net
• Eprocessing Network
• Internet Secure (Canadian)

Again, our coder approached it from a very elegant coding stance, and simplified it so that it requires minimal user complexity.

Developer licenses are available for both modules, allowing installs on unlimited sites.