Shopify stores can display product prices either tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive, depending on store settings. Katana always stores sales prices as tax-exclusive. So when Katana imports a Shopify product whose price is tax-inclusive, it has to back-calculate the tax-exclusive price.
The default tax rate is what Katana uses for that calculation.
Background
In Katana, Default Sales Prices (set on product cards) are always tax-exclusive. Taxes are only applied when products are added to a sales order.
In Shopify, you can choose whether product prices are Taxes included or Taxes excluded.
These settings affect how Katana calculates the Default Sales Price when importing products from Shopify.
You can check your Shopify settings under: Finance > Taxes
Shopify store settings (currency, default location, and tax inclusion/exclusion) are updated in Katana once per day. You can also refresh them manually by reconfiguring the integration.
How Shopify settings affect Katana prices
If your Shopify store uses Taxes included:
Open Shopify configuration page.
Select the Products tab and find the Default tax rate in Shopify field (only appears if Shopify reports your store has tax-inclusive prices). If your Shopify store displays tax-exclusive prices, this field is hidden — no back-calculation is needed.
Katana detects this automatically based on Shopify's Store data. You can't toggle this manually.
How the calculation works
When you trigger a product import (or a per-order import for an order's line items), Katana runs:
Katana sales price = Shopify price × 100 / (100 + x)
Where x is the Default tax rate percentage you entered.
Examples (assuming Default tax rate = 20%):
Shopify price (tax-inclusive) | Katana sales price (tax-exclusive) |
120.00 | 100.00 |
60.00 | 50.00 |
24.00 | 20.00 |
Note: The price per unit on sales orders synced from Shopify always matches the product price in Shopify, even if it differs from the Default Sales Price stored in Katana.
What if products use different tax rates in Shopify?
The Default tax rate is one global value per Shopify connection. If your Shopify catalog uses different rates for different products, the import applies the same Default to all of them. After import, you can adjust individual Katana variants' sales prices manually.
For most stores, products share a single tax rate (e.g. country-wide VAT).
Changing the default tax rate later
You can update the Default tax rate at any time on the Products tab. The new rate will be used for future imports — it does not retroactively recalculate the prices of existing Katana variants. To apply a new rate to existing products, you'd need to update prices in Katana directly.
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