TaxCalc Carrier App Expansion
Expanding a cross-border tax & duty calculation engine from Shopify into Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC),
while protecting fast merchant onboarding and reliability.
Problem
- TaxCalc worked well in Shopify, but growth required expanding to Magento and SFCC.
- Each platform has different checkout APIs, extensibility, and integration effort—risking longer onboarding and higher failure rates.
- Goal: keep onboarding & implementation time low while ensuring consistent calculation accuracy across platforms.
My Role
- Product strategy + integration design: platform sequencing, scope definition, constraints mapping.
- Wrote product requirements and integration approach for Magento + SFCC (basic vs extended pathways).
- Partnered with engineering/architecture to standardize backend API contracts and reduce platform-specific complexity.
Approach
- Defined two integration modes: Basic (core shipping/tax/duty calculations) vs Extended (localized payments + deeper checkout customization).
- Compared Shopify vs Magento vs SFCC on API maturity, checkout extension points, middleware needs, and effort.
- Proposed a unified backend contract so the same service can serve all platforms with consistent payloads.
Outputs
- Integration pathways and sequencing plan (which platform first, and why).
- High-level architecture and responsibilities (frontend plugin vs middleware vs backend).
- Risk matrix: API constraints, merchant variability, implementation complexity, and mitigations.
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