Understanding Discrepancies Between Shopify and Zamp Filing Notices

Shopify is first and foremost an e-commerce platform, and while it does provide a standard Sales Tax report, that report is not specifically tailored for tax filing purposes. Zamp reports are purpose built to ensure compliance with sales tax laws and to enable accurate tax filings, so we aggregate and group sales tax data differently than Shopify.

As a result, there can sometimes be variances between the estimated taxes in Zamp filing notices and the taxes seen in the Shopify Sales Tax report. Here are a few examples as to why these variances occur:

Potential Factors Contributing to Discrepancies Between Shopify and Zamp Filing Notices

1. States and date ranges:

• Zamp's filing notice only contains the states where a filing is due in the current month, and the estimated taxes listed in the email encompass each state's entire filing period. As a result, states with a monthly frequency will only show estimated taxes for the previous month, but states with a quarterly frequency will show estimated taxes for the entire three-month period that Zamp will be filing. If based on the Shopify Sales Tax report for the previous month you would expect to see additional states, or if the estimated taxes look larger than you'd expect, this is a likely reason for the difference.

2. Time Zones:

• Shopify uses a single timezone for your shop across all reports, so all orders are standardized to a single timezone. Zamp assigns to each order the time zone of the state capital where the order is shipped, because that is how states would expect to receive sales tax reports. This means the time zones used in our reports are more accurate for filing sales tax returns, but will not always match up with Shopify.

3. Orders placed through Shopify App Marketplace apps:

• If your customers place orders through apps available in the Shopify Marketplace (e.g. the TikTok app, Meta, Aftership, Faire), there may be variances based on whether Shopify treats orders placed through those apps as marketplace facilitated or resale orders.
• While Zamp accounts for the marketplace or resale status of many of the most popular Shopify apps, there are thousands of apps in the Shopify Marketplace. If you believe your Shopify store contains orders placed through an app that should be considered marketplace facilitated or wholesale, please let us know via support@zamp.com!

4. Early Filing Discounts:

• Our system incorporates early filing discounts where applicable. This may result in discrepancies in the final amounts when compared to Shopify’s reports, as they do not consider these discounts.