Just as we are ready to go live on one of my client’s web site, we started to test the tax rules just to make sure that taxes would apply properly. To our surprise, it DIDN’T!
After verifying the tax classes and customer groups, I got lucky by noticing that for some odd reason, all of my products had their tax class set to NONE instead of TAXABLE GOODS, WTF!! Since there were over 3000 products, I figure using the admin page to do a bulk update of the attribute will one way or another just time out.
After some digging, I have found a way to directly modify the tax class field in phpmyadmin, below is the script that I used to make this sweeping change. Seems to work, but just make sure a backup is done before running this:
UPDATE `catalog_product_entity_int` SET `value` = ’2′ WHERE `catalog_product_entity_int`.`attribute_id` =81;
Attribute_ID 81 is the tax class flag for the products. Whereas value of 2 indicates “Taxable Goods”, if you want to set as downloadable goods, this is set to “4″
