Reduce API calls to TaxCloud

Hi,

Cache is already implemented in the TaxCloud plugin.
When a cart is loaded, three functions of the plugin are called:
- verifyAddress which get the USPS address from the address entered by the user to make sure that we're dealing with a valid address
- lookup which load the taxes for the products
- onAfterProcessShippings which load the taxes for the shipping methods
In each function, you'll see that the code uses getUserState and setUserState to store and load data to / from the user session so that if a request is the same as one already done, it is skipped and the data in the user session is used instead.
So these functions are called each time a product will be added to the cart, and then when the user enters his address, when he changes his cart content, or modify his address, and then another 2 functions will be called again when the order is created (and maybe one when the order is confirmed).
So that can quickly add up.

While the taxes might not be needed on your website before the customer access the cart, that might be different for someone else. If the customer is already logged in with a user with an address and he adds something in the cart, if the cart module is displayed on the page where the customer adds a product in the cart, and the cart module is configured to display taxes, it needs the taxes to be calculated. Or if the merchant is using the "shipping estimation" plugin so that the customer can get the shipping price on the product page while the shipping methods are taxed and he wants to display the shipping prices with taxes.

Thinking about it, I suppose some code could be added to the plugin to skip when the user didn't login or fill in the guest form yet.
Try adding the code:

if(!hikashop_loadUser(false))
			return false;

protected function lookup(&$cart) {

protected function verifyAddress() {

Hi,

In that case, the code modification I proposed won't help you at all.
Where you can save on TaxCloud API calls:
- make sure that every user that has access to the non public store already has at least one billing and one shipping address and that the one that will be most used is their default billing/shipping address (that will reduce the address switching needed).
- prevent the customers from changing the products in their cart on the cart module / checkout.
- allow customers to add products to the cart in bulk. If your products don't have variants/options/custom item fields, you can set the "Add to cart on listings" setting to "global on listings" in the HikaShop configuration and make sure that the "add to cart button" setting is activated in your products listings. That way, on the listings, you'll get a quantity field for each product and a main add to cart button at the bottom of the listing so that customers can add several products of the same listing at once.

Hi,

When you have the cart in "mini" mode and you activate the corresponding setting in the cart module, you have an icon to delete the whole cart at once. So you could activate this while disabling the ability for them to delete the products one by one.
But as you said, I think it will make the life of your users harder.

The addresses are per user. So if you wanted to have a custom system to automatically add all the global addresses to your users when they are created / logged in, that would be possible with a custom plugin development. But that will cost a few hundred euros and I'm not sure it will reduce the API calls that much.
The way TaxCloud API is made, it requires many API calls :/

One other idea would be to only call the TaxCloud API when the order is being created. The drawback is that the customer doesn't see the tax amount before he already went through the checkout and discovers the total amount with taxes on the payment gateway page. But that would allow you to reduce drastically the amount of API calls while the modifications are not too complex to add to the plugin.

Hi,

I think it could be done by overriding the whole hikashopAddressClass of administrator/components/com_hikashop/classes/address.php with a system plugin to be able to override the functions getByUser, loadUserAddresses and getCurrentUserAddress so they always return the same list of addresses.
We actually have documentation on how to do that here:
www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/6...ntation.html#classes
The question will then be how that list of addresses is provided to the plugin ? With options in the plugin ? Directly hard coded in the code of the plugin ? With some kind of interface in the backend ? Should the provided addresses be different for billing and shipping ?

Regarding the TaxCloud plugin, the only solution I see is to not calculate the tax at all until the order is created. That's possible but it has huge implications for customers since they won't know the amount of taxes they'll be charged until the order is created. We can't add that, even as an option to the plugin.
Another possibility would be to calculate the taxes in the cart based on the current URL. That's possible, but again, it's more of a custom thing than a standard thing we should add in the plugin I think.

Hi,

So all that is possible. However, it requires quite a bit of work.
We can talk about costs via our contact form:
www.hikashop.com/support/contact-us.html

I would personally recommend to first work on a custom TaxCloud plugin, with a check to skip it based on either a whitelist or a blacklist of URLs. I suppose that it's something which could be done in a matter of several hours of work.
Having a component to manage addresses and inject them to the address list of the customers is possible, but we're talking about a bigger project with at least several days of work.