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Tax on a LaunchMyStore order is decided on the server, from the customer’s shipping address. Neither the storefront nor an app chooses the rate. If your app reads, quotes against, or modifies an order total, there are two things you need to know, and both of them change the arithmetic.

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1. The rate comes from the destination

A merchant configures a rate per destination. When an order is priced, the most specific match wins:
  1. the customer’s country and region (a US state, a Canadian province)
  2. the customer’s country — the shape every EU member state uses
  3. the merchant’s Other catch-all row, if they have set one
  4. otherwise no tax
Step 4 is not an error. A merchant who sells into ten countries and configures rates for three is telling you the other seven are untaxed. Do not fall back to “the first rate you can find” — that is how a customer in a country with no nexus ends up charged another country’s rate.
The merchant’s per-destination rates are not exposed on the App API. Read the tax your app needs from the order or cart totals rather than trying to reconstruct it.

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2. Inclusive pricing does not move the total

GET /api/v1/settings/taxes returns productPrices, which is either ExclusiveOfTax or InclusiveOfTax. This is a store-wide setting and it changes what the tax figure means: A €149 product at 19% carries €23.79 of tax when prices are inclusive, and the customer pays €149.00. The same product at the same rate carries €28.31 when prices are exclusive, and the customer pays €177.31. Consumer sales in the EU and the UK require the advertised price to be the price paid, so stores selling there run inclusive. An app that assumes tax is always added on top will over-state every total on those stores by the tax amount.

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The trap

Applying the exclusive formula to an inclusive price does not just misplace the tax — it produces a larger number, because it charges tax on a price that already contains tax. Always branch on productPrices; never infer it from the figures.

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Where the tax appears

  • Orders API — tax_price on the order, and tax_lines[] on each line item.
  • Order records — the tax calculated when the order was placed is stored with it. Changing a rate afterwards never re-prices an existing order.

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What is not supported yet

  • B2B reverse charge. A VAT-registered business buyer in another EU country is charged VAT like any other customer; there is no VIES validation step.
  • Reduced rates per product. A rate applies to the whole catalogue in that country, so books, food and children’s clothing cannot carry their own rate.
If your app needs either, handle it in your own logic rather than assuming the platform has applied it.