A month ago we wrote about our plans on how to support taxes in picu E-commerce. The development of this turned out do be much less straightforward and took a lot more time than we anticipated, which is why we weren’t able to release Alpha-3 as planned. In this post we’d like to give an overview of the current status.
Display prices including/excluding taxes?
Some countries, like Germany, have very strict laws about E-commerce. For example: If you sell to end-consumers directly, all prices must be displayed including taxes, which wouldn’t be that hard to do if you serve only Germany, but what about photographers that work internationally and need to support different tax rates? We quickly realized that to properly support this, we would need one (or a combination of) the following:
- Popup/Modal window when clients first visit a store, to choose their country
- A prominent dropdown menu to choose/switch country, that would need to be visible at all times
- Recognize Geolocation by IP address, to automatically select the correct country, when a client arrives at the page
We want to make this as frictionless as possible for clients, which is why the last one – Geolocation by IP – is our most favorable option but as this will take a moment to develop, we needed a workaround that will work right now.
Our current solution
For now, and to not further delay our progress, we decided to simplify the settings for taxes and removed the option so select how to show prices in the frontend and for now will only keep the setting on how to enter prices – including or excluding taxes.

If you activated taxes and entered prices without taxes, we will add “+ Taxes” in the frontend to notice the customer that taxes will be applied during checkout. And finally in the checkout, when the customer was able to chose their country, the exact tax will be calculated and displayed.

If you are in Germany and must display prices including taxes, you can switch the setting to enter full prices including taxes and the prices will be calculated the other way around to display them correctly as well.
There are still things that can be enhanced in the future, but this should be working in a lot of different scenarios already.
Next Steps / Current Planning
- Finish Tax settings and finally ship Alpha-3 to our beta testers for a last feedback round
- Implement the rest of the feedback we got, and some final testing
- Release picu 3.0 including E-commerce until May