I had a conversation with developer from the Drupal community yesterday that did not center on the technicalities of developing for the open source community but on more global issues and philosophical concerns.

This fellow, Alex, stated that open source was a community made up of rebellious folks – they want it their way and do not follow blindly the code of others.  Well, he didn’t say it that way but that’s what I took away from that conversation.

We are talking about tax code compliance specifically.

I set up my clients’ Zen Cart websites for taxes in their home state and don’t worry about what they do with that after the fact. And Alex says that’s the problem.  We in the open source community manage to ignore how intricate the tax code can be. Why?  Well, because it’s so intricate and changes regularly depending on the governmental entity(ies) whims and laws.

So the solution?  Well, it’s definitely not something I’m going to tackle without some real time reaching out to get tax rates, that’s for sure.  About 4 years ago I coded changes into a cart on request of a client who said he was required to collect sales tax in all US states.  There were some special cases in about 10 states for his type of product.  The solution worked fairly well until I started upgrading his sites.

So we started looking at tax specific alternatives.

This customer has been paying 100’s of dollars to integrate with an online program that delivered tax rates by zip code. It does nothing else.

After some research I found AvaTax. This program goes way beyond just supplying tax rates. Go to their site to find out more about it.

But the problem is that there is no mod available yet.  Why? Many of the proprietary e-commerce carts have developed their own mods and are profiting off AvaTax.  Not so much the Open Source carts.  Ew, profit and open source?  No, no, we must remain free from such taint!

So here’s the quandry, do we in the open source world stay aloof, above the muck of making money?  Or do we abdicate responsibility to our clients, users and developers by avoiding legalities?

Because tax compliance is a reality in most nations. And it is a part of doing business in e-commerce. Here in the US, we are seeing the states start trying to regulate the internet to get the money off those sales.  There’s even a push for a federal sales tax in Congress and I’m sure the internet sales will be included in that. Sen Dick Durbin (D) of Illinois has announced his intention to introduce a bill this year for an internet sales tax.

It’s coming – more regulation, more taxes, complicating the tax codes and e-commerce more and more.

So, it looks like I’ll be working on the Ava Tax mod for Zen Cart – without any help from the Zen Cart community. Why?  Because I’m not allowed to post for help on this in the forum. I did post and it was removed due to the fact that I’m promoting a commercial product.

AvaTax isn’t paying me to do this.  My client is glad to donate some money but there’s no way they will finance this. Once it’s done, I’ll be able to profit on a commission basis most likely. But I know better than to count on that:  I’m doing it because it has to be done.

What’s happening at Zen Cart:

Now as much as posting about commercial ventures is forbidden on ZenCart.com, there is a move afoot to create revenue streams for the Zen Cart project.  They have a book about Zen Cart that they promote and they now require payments from hosting companies as part of their Zen Cart Certified Hosting.

I had noticed that happening and have been curious but was enlightened this week by someone close to the core team.  It’s all about PCI compliance and certifying Zen Cart.  Zen Cart is PCI compliant but to get certified as that costs money. 

PCI Compliance

Fact of life, making money on the web cannot be done based on totally free software in the future: if you take credit cards, your options for ecommerce carts will decrease as new rules come into play from the credit card companies.  Especially if you really make money…

Most of the small carts find themselves paying an extra $10 or $20 a month because of PCI non-compliance. PCI compliance depends more that just your software; it also depends on your server so that is harder to attain.

Carts that make the big bucks pay a much bigger premium for non-compliance – much bigger.

Okay, so tax compliance is mandatory and PCI non-compliance can be costly.  Yet Open Source projects either disallow commercial aspects completely or are making money behind the scenes themselves. Kinda schizophrenic actually.

If the Zen Cart core team would allow discussion of commercials addons for taxes, perhaps I could let them know that developing a partnership with Avalara’s AvaTax can be profit making for Zen Cart instead of just me.  Well, I’ll send links to this blog post and hope I’m not ignored!

My source from the Zen Cart team predicts that Zen Cart may be the only open source e-commerce project left standing in a few years because of direction they are taking to work towards PCI (PA-DSS) certification.

Okay, then I’ve thrown in my lot with the right folks – not by accident, mind you. I had good reasons for choosing Zen Cart years ago. But there’s more work to be done, more things that need to be openly discussed and more reasons to look toward commercial addons that do what no lone developer or small group can do.