Homegrown calculates sales tax automatically based on your pickup location's tax jurisdiction. Most vendors don't need to configure anything — but if tax appears wrong, missing, or causes checkout to error, this guide walks through the most common cases.
How sales tax is calculated
Tax is determined by the pickup location's address (or delivery address, where delivery is offered). The platform looks up the appropriate state, county, and city rates for each order. Vendors don't manually enter tax rates.
Why am I seeing no tax on my orders?
Three possible reasons:
Your pickup location is in a state without sales tax (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, plus some food-specific exemptions in other states).
Your products are tax-exempt food items in your state. Many states exempt unprepared groceries (raw produce, dairy, basic baked goods) from sales tax — even when they tax prepared foods.
Your address isn't being recognized. Open Account → Locations and verify the full address is filled in including ZIP. An incomplete address can cause tax to fall back to zero.
Checkout error: "Zamp API Error"
Zamp is the third-party service that powers tax calculation. If a shopper sees a Zamp API error at checkout, it's usually one of:
Pickup address is incomplete or unparseable — go to Account → Locations and re-save your address. Use the autocomplete suggestion when typing.
Product missing a tax category — extremely rare; new product types occasionally don't have a tax category assigned by default. Message support and we'll fix it on our end.
Temporary Zamp outage — wait 5-10 minutes and try again. If it persists, message support.
Tax on the customer's side
Shoppers see the calculated tax line on the checkout page before paying. The total they pay is item subtotal + sales tax. There are no shopper service fees.
Where tax goes
Sales tax collected at checkout is held separately from your earnings and remitted to the appropriate tax authority on a regular schedule. You don't need to file anything yourself for sales collected through Homegrown — see your Sales Tax Collection article for the full breakdown.