Re: Proposal: support for taxes in PriceSpecification

On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 09:20:52 +0100, Martin Hepp  
<martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

> I will look into your various proposals as far as they touch the  
> e-commerce model in schema.org.
> In the past, we considered extending the tax modeling in GoodRelations,  
> but we postponed that, mainly for two reasons:
>
> 1. GoodRelations focusses on the discovery phase of business  
> transactions. In that phase, a detailed modeling of taxes and fees is  
> less important. Also, the VAT property was not really used a lot.

In some places, VAT and other taxes and fees, especially those that don't  
always apply, are specified separately, so the "price" isn't really the  
price. Airline prices are dreadful for that, in general.

> 2. Very often, the applicable tax is not a fixed property for a single  
> offer, but depends on the country (or in the US even the state) of  
> delivery, so you end up with with a ternary relation between a price  
> specification, a country, and tax details. In some cases, even the legal  
> status of the buyer will have influence (for instance, in B2B scenarios  
> in Europe, there is no VAT, while in B2C scenarios, the VAT of the  
> country of origin applies).
>
> 3. The applicable taxes follow certain (often complicated rules);  
> materializing those at the level of each single price information seems  
> problematic.

The rules may not be so complex. Certainly there are many common cases -  
VAT (varies by buyer, buyer location, product type), credit card  
surcharges, delivery costs, processing fee (e.g. in order to get an  
official receipt for an airfare from one of Spain's biggest travel agents  
I have to pay a separate and apparently outrageous fee).

> I will propose a generic property-value pattern to schema.org asap;  
> maybe we can use that to provide a pattern for tax information.

Looking forward to the proposal.

cheers

Chaals

> Martin
> On Jan 26, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Kévin Dunglas wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> A great addition to http://schema.org/PriceSpecification would be
>> taxes. There already is a valueAddedTaxIncluded property but:
>> * This property is not sufficient to compute the amount of the VAT.
>> The VAT rate varies by country. It can even be different in the same
>> country depending of the product or service's type.
>> * It tells nothing about other taxes that apply such as ecotax. For
>> instance, the french law requires displaying the ecotax amount to
>> customers.
>>
>> Moreover, most i18n/l10n enabled e-commerce platforms (including
>> Magento and Prestashop) provide a Tax data model.
>>
>>
>> I propose to add the following property to
>> http://schema.org/PriceSpecification:
>>
>> Property              | Expected Type             | Description
>> ------------------------- | ---------------------------------- |
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> applyingTax         | ApplyingTax                 | One or more tax
>> applying to this price (included in the price property)
>>
>> And the following types:
>>
>> http://schema.org/ApplyingTax
>>
>> Property | Expected Type  | Description
>> ------------ | ----------------------- |
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> tax         | Tax                  | The type of tax
>> amount   | Number or Text | The amount of the tax
>>
>>
>> http://schema.org/Tax
>>
>> Instances of Tax:
>> * http://schema.org/ValueAddedTax
>> * http://schema.org/Ecotax
>>
>> Let me know if it sounds interesting. In such case I'll make a formal
>> RDFa proposal.
>> --
>> Kévin Dunglas
>>
>> http://dunglas.fr
>>
>>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>
> e-mail:  hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
> phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
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>          http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
> skype:   mfhepp
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>
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>
>
>
>


-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2014 13:09:45 UTC