Business-to-Consumer Transactions

By default, in most implementations, Vertex for Marketplaces facilitates liability determination for three parties:

Seller
Buyer
Marketplace

In 2-Party Sales mode, only two parties can be liable:

Seller
Buyer

This 2-Party Sales mode is used by some customers to facilitate transactions where only one of these two parties can be liable. To implement it, you need to configure your sellers' settings.

Where Liability Determination is available, it is used to determine liability. Where it is not available, the liability for physical goods generally defaults to the buyer. This mode is used for transactions where the seller or buyer is liable for sales in that region or country.

This mode applies to both Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions.

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Note
If you want to use this mode, you need to contact Vertex to ensure that the delegation check setting is turned off.

Seller settings

To enable this mode, you need to set the use_markteplace_as_intermediary to false. If you set this to false, the 2-party sales logic is used for applicable sales. These are transactions where the seller or buyer is liable for sales in that region or country.

The following table lists the seller settings needed for this mode. It can be set for a specific region or country subdivision:

Setting	Description
Region: `<region>.use_marketplace_as_intermediary` and Subdivision: `.<country_subdivision>.use_marketplace_as_intermediary`	If you set this to `false`, the 2-party sales logic is used for applicable sales by the seller. If you set it to `true`, 2-party mode is disabled and 3-party logic can apply where applicable.

The following example shows the settings for the European Union (EU) region:

"regions": {
                        "EU": {
                            "taxation": {
                                "physical": {
                                    "is_seller_located_within_region": true,
                                    "use_marketplace_as_intermediary": false
                                }
                            }
                        },

The following example shows 2-party sales mode enabled for physical goods in Taiwan:

        "sellers": [
            {
                "seller_code": "seller-1",
                "settings": {
                   "countries": {
                    "country_subdivision": {
                        "TW": {
                            "taxation": {
                                "physical": {
                                    "is_physical_tax-enabled": true,
                                    "is_seller_registered": true,
                                    "has_physical_presence": true,
                                    "use_marketplace_as_intermediary":false
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}

Request examples

The following example shows a virtual seller based in Taiwan, selling a physical good:

{
    "transaction": {
        "currency_code": "USD",
        "buyer_name": "Test buyer",
        "ship_to_address": {
            "country_code": "TW"
        },
        "transaction_lines": [
            {
                "amount": 101,
                "quantity": 1,
                "custom_id": "line_1",
                "ship_from_address": {
                    "country_code": "PL"
                },
                "product_class": "P",
                "seller_code": "seller-1"
            }
        ],
        "sellers": [
            {
                "seller_code": "seller-1",
                "settings": {
                    "countries": {
                      "country_subdivision": {
                        "TW": {
                            "taxation": {
                                "physical": {
                                    "is_physical_tax-enabled": true,
                                    "is_seller_registered": true,
                                    "has_physical_presence": true,
                                    "use_marketplace_as_intermediary":false
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}