Sales tax is one of the jobs Minicart takes off your plate. It is worked out at checkout, added to what your customer pays and filed on your behalf. There is nothing to set up and no separate tax app to pay for. Sloane is your accounting teammate and looks after the money side of your store.
US only for now. Selling on Minicart is currently available to stores based in the United States.
Tax is worked out at checkout
Your customer sees a Tax line in the order summary. Until they enter an address it reads Calculated at next step, because the rate depends on where the order is going.
For orders you ship, the rate comes from your customer's shipping address and your business address.
For digital orders there is nothing to ship, so your customer's billing address is used instead.
Shipping charges are taxed automatically in the states that tax them. There is no setting for this.
Tax is added on top of the order, so your prices stay exactly the prices shown on your product pages.
Minicart collects and files it for you
Under marketplace facilitator laws, Minicart is the one responsible for collecting and filing sales tax on your orders, not you. Where tax is due, it is set aside at the time of the sale and sent on to the tax authorities.
That means collected tax is never part of your payout. What reaches your bank is your proceeds minus fees, with the tax already carved out, so you are not sitting on money you will owe later. See What you pay per sale for what those fees are and How payouts work for when the money lands.
This is included on every plan, the free one too.
Why does tax show up on some orders but not others?
Because the collecting is Minicart's job, the rules that matter are the ones that apply to Minicart. A state only requires a marketplace to collect once that marketplace has nexus there, meaning enough sales or enough orders into that state to cross the state's threshold. Until Minicart crosses the threshold in a given state, no tax is due on orders headed there, so your customer is charged none.
So an order to one state can show tax while an identical order to another shows none. That is not a bug and it is not a setting you missed on your product. It is two states with different rules and Minicart sitting at a different point against each threshold.
You can rest easy on this:
Every sale is tracked against every state's threshold on our side.
Collection switches on automatically, state by state, as those thresholds are crossed. You will never be asked to flip anything on and you will never be caught under-collecting.
Wherever tax is due, it goes to the right state, county, city and other local authorities on your behalf.
You never need to register in a state, collect tax yourself or handle sales tax filings for your Minicart sales.
As Minicart grows into more states you will simply see tax appear on more orders over time. Nothing changes for you when that happens.
Tax codes decide the rate
States tax clothing, food, books and digital goods differently, so every product carries a Tax code that says which kind of thing it is.
Ask Sloane to change your store-wide default: "set my default tax code to clothing". Ask Sloane for a single product or a batch of them: "this candle is a home fragrance, fix its tax code" or "set the tax code on all my prints to digital graphics". Either way you see the change before it is saved. Nothing is saved without your approval.
The details, if you want them:
Your store-wide default is Default tax code, under Settings > Business info in the left sidebar. It is General merchandise unless you change it, which is the right answer for most products.
New products start from that default. To give one product its own code, open the product, click Tax code and search for the one that fits.
Digital products are set to Digital graphics for you, which is tax free in most states. See Sell digital products.
Refunds return the tax too
When you refund a whole order or just some of its items, the tax on those items goes back to your customer with them and the filing is corrected automatically. There is nothing for you to reverse. See Issue a refund or handle a return.
Your 1099-K
At the end of the year you may receive a 1099-K, an IRS form summarizing the payments processed for your store. It is issued through Stripe, our payments partner. It reports gross sales, not profit.
You only get one if you cross the reporting threshold. For the 2026 tax year that is $20,000 in gross sales and more than 200 orders. A few states set lower thresholds than the federal one, so you may receive a form at a smaller volume depending on where you are based.
A 1099-K is about your income taxes, which is a separate thing from the sales tax above. Sales tax is already handled for you.
Your own taxes and licenses
Sales tax on your Minicart orders is covered. You still look after your own income taxes, business licenses and any product-specific tax or regulatory obligations. If you are not sure where you stand, a tax professional is worth the hour.
Ask Sloane
Ask Sloane "how much tax did I collect last month" and she will pull up your sales summary, where Taxes collected sits alongside your gross sales and returns. You can change the date range on it yourself.