I agree that re-designing your entire website at this point in time would be cost-prohibitive.
But...but...but aren't they already using those tax look-up tables after the sale?
How much harder would it have been to build the website to apply those same tables before the sale?
Tell me then, why was the site designed to apply the table after the sale rather than before the sale?
What role did cost play in making that decision?
Because taxes aren't meant to be part of the buying equation, because before the 'net it was an immaterial line of thinking. no one would travel to buy a tv, unless you lived close enough to a state without sales tax, like here in delaware with people from Philly and Bal'mor'. That's relatively rare in the world of brick and mortar stores in the material world with material goods. Mail order was all but dead by the 80s. Logistics and fuel costs made buying outside the scope of local brick and mortar made damned little sense other than specialty items, sizes, or foreign goods.
And all this Net <---> Tax stuff was enacted long, long after ecommerce was already a thing and was not enforced at all by law, which was enacted long, long after retail sales was a thing. If you look at the timeline of retail sales -> internet -> ecommerce -> taxation, there's not a flow that makes sense from a "what we know now" perspective. It's the best example "hindsight is 20/20" pretty much any where in the real world. Nothing on the net was taxed at first, then some was, then more was, and it seems Amazon and eBay are the last hold outs, and were still doing so legally based on presence.
It doesn't matter what your or I think; neither you nor I are writing the checks to retrofit stuff into entrenched systems that, 99% of the time, are running on 1995-sophistication-level software in some shitty PHP package that only feels modern through patches and updates, and is in reality a spaghetti bowl of shit code, wrapped around shit patches applied to shit code, that's not equipped to call a modern API.
I'm working on a system right now that loads EVERYTHING about a user and his business into page-code rendered HTML to surface later because the back end runs so piss-poorly that it can't handle frequent return visits to an api because 1) there's no API, and 2) it's shit code, and 3) even though it's "new" code (written in the last two years), it was done so by 1995-level coders working in PHP which is an antiquated, mixed layer piece of shit platform.
Sure, it *can* be constructed to work in a more modern MVC w/REST design, but most PHP coders don't think that way because they're 1995 coders getting by doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. Like Harley riders who are actually 1-year-experience riders for 30 years.
Bottom line... it's a pointless conversation; without NEW systems being written, it's not even remotely cost effective to change something like this in what is almost assuredly a legacy platform.
As a guy who works in this stuff every day, I promise you, your ideas are sound, not cost effective, and are pointless thought exercises that will only serve to frustrate you further because you don't accept the "not cost effective" answer, even though it's the only answer that exists in the real world.
Whew. Eat that circle's tail for a while. Yikes.
