Creating Backup Rates

In the rare event of a TaxJar API system problem or outage, the delivery of sales tax calculations for your customers could be interrupted. 

We want to ensure you’re prepared should this scenario ever occur, so here’s a little more detail on using backup rates from our API Guidelines for Sales Tax Calculations. We recommend using the summarized rates endpoint and entering in these state rate averages as a fallback. 

• Implementing this step ensures that you’ll always receive a calculation for either the minimum or average sales tax rate in your nexus location(s).

In order to utilize our summary_rates endpoint to its full potential, please use the list returned from the endpoint to build a table of backup rates. 

• The response from this endpoint will include a minimum and average sales tax rate for each region/state that TaxJar supports. 
• Building a backup rate table with the average sales tax rates will ensure that you are collecting tax in the event you lose connection to the TaxJar API. Note: A backup tax rate may be slightly less accurate because it is based on either the minimum or average sales tax rate.

Once you've set up your backup rates,  we then recommend that you update your backup rates on a regular basis to ensure your backup rates remain current, as the minimum and average rates may change as the states updates rates. 

In addition to this API endpoint, our native plugins also have methods of accommodating backup rates:

- Magento 1 and 2 can automatically import ZIP code based backup rates enabled by the Backup Rates feature. (Learn more about this feature here.)

- WooCommerce and BigCommerce will both utilize their own tax settings/rates so you can set up tax rates manually in the event these systems fall back to manual calculations due to a TaxJar outage.