Keeping resale and exemption certificates in order

Shopify will stop charging a customer tax, and the mechanism is better than most people expect. On a customer you can choose "Collect tax", "Don't collect tax", or "Collect tax unless exemptions apply" — and that third option opens a list of named exemptions to pick from. There are 74 of them: every US state's reseller exemption, twenty-three Canadian ones, and the EU reverse charge. On B2B, the same settings sit on the company location, with a field for their tax ID — labelled VAT number for UK and EU addresses.

And here is the part that is entirely yours: the certificate. Shopify has nowhere to put the document, no field for the date it expires, and nothing that tells you when one has. The flag is a switch with no memory. Turn it on for a reseller in 2026 and it is still on in 2029, long after their certificate lapsed — and in an audit, the flag is not the evidence. The certificate is, and Shopify never had it.

What that means in practice

The paperwork lives somewhere else. An email folder, a shared drive, a tax-compliance service. Whatever you use, Shopify does not know about it and will not ask.

Nothing expires. There is no expiry date on a tax exemption in Shopify, so there is no report of what has lapsed and no warning before it does. The first time anyone notices is usually during a review of returns — the expensive moment to find out.

And the untaxed sales keep happening in the meantime. Every order that goes out untaxed against a certificate that is no longer valid is a liability you carry, and it accumulates quietly because the store behaves exactly as it did when the paperwork was good.

Certificates in an email folder and a flag that never expires? Describe what should happen instead →

Getting it under control without new software

If you have a handful of exempt accounts, this is genuinely enough:

1. Put the expiry somewhere you will look. A shared calendar with a reminder six weeks before, per customer. Crude and effective.
2. Keep the certificate filed under something you can search by — the customer's name as it appears in Shopify, not the name on their letterhead.
3. Record the certificate number where the flag is. A note on the customer, or a metafield you define, so whoever opens the record can see what justified it.
4. Review the whole list quarterly. Filter your customers by tax settings and check each one against your file. Twenty accounts is half an hour.

The moment that stops working is when the list is long enough that nobody does it. Then the flags stay on, because nothing in the system ever says otherwise.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

You describe it the way the risk actually works: "Keep a record of each exempt account's certificate and when it runs out, remind me six weeks before, and tell me if we are still selling untaxed to somebody whose paperwork has expired."

What you get is the memory Shopify does not have — the certificate reference, the expiry, and a warning in time to ask for a new one rather than after the fact.

Two things to say plainly.

The tax flag itself stays your decision. An exemption removed automatically is a customer charged tax they may not owe — the paperwork is frequently in the post rather than actually missing — so what you get is told, in time, with what you need to act on it, and the flag is yours to flip.

And the certificate is a document, not data. Where you keep the file is your decision — we keep the record of it and the date, which is the part that makes the difference between knowing and finding out.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. If the app cannot complete your request on the spot, somebody at Shopivibe takes it on straight away and has it working in your store within 24 hours, included in the plan at no extra charge. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Know which certificates are expiring? Describe the reminder you need →