Downloads need shipping address for sales tax

[mlyth]

We sell only downloadable products. WA requires sales tax on the destination address, not the billing address. However, Magento in its wisdom decides that shipping addresses aren't necessary for downloads. How can I get it to allow the shipping address?

Thanks in advance.... desperate newbie developer

[Theis Corfixen]

Hi @mlyth 

I haven't delt with this personally but as I see it there are two options here, simply renaming the billing address to shipping address / customer address / whatever address to fall in line with your countries rules. 

The other way is to let Magento use its own shipping address. Its now showing becaouse the quote object returns true on the isVirtual, which in turns checks the product objects for getIsVirtual, which replies on the product type model's method isVirtual.

For downloaded products its:

Mage_Downloadable_Model_Product_Type

So you need to rewrite one of the objects in this chain to return false, depending on how far up on the system you want to affect the store. I'm not sure if there is a better way of doing this since I have never come across this issue before.

I hope this helps :-)