Best way of calculating stripe taxamo price including tax - ruby

Question

Hi I'm curious of how to best calculate the price including VAT for a product pre checkout. Currently the only way I found is creating a order containing the item and then fetching the tax and price from the order. This however creates a lot of redundant orders and seems sub optimal. Is there a way to do this calculation without creating an order?
def get_price
location = current_user.location
location_data = APP_CONFIG['country_list'][location]
currency = location_data['currency']
country_code = location_data['code']
product_id = APP_CONFIG['stripe_reconstruction_ids'][currency]
product = Stripe::Product.retrieve(product_id)
product_sku = product['skus']['data'][0]['id']
ip = request.remote_ip
order = Stripe::Order.create(
:currency => currency,
:customer => current_user.stripe_id,
:items => [
{
:type => 'sku',
:parent => product_sku,
:quantity => 1,
:currency => currency
}
],
:email => current_user.email,
:metadata => {
:buyer_ip => ip,
:billing_country_code => country_code,
:product_type => 'e-service'
}
)
render :json => order, :status => 200 and return
rescue => error
logger.error error.message
render :json => { message: "Could not fetch the correct price." }, :status => 500 and return
end
UPDATE
After talking to the stripe support my proposal seems to be the best way to do this at the moment. I suggested to them that it would be nice if developers could set a flag on the order that it was just for pricing information to avoid creating an order that would not later be used for a payment. They said they would deliver this suggestion to their developers. Perhaps we will have a better way to do this in the future.

Answer 1

You can use Taxamo's API Calculate tax endpoint (Ruby client lib is available).
Note that if setting buyer_ip private token must be used, otherwise field is ignored.
Example curl call:
curl -X 'POST' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d \
'{
"transaction": {
"currency_code": "EUR",
"transaction_lines": [
{
"custom_id": "line1",
"product_type": "e-service",
"amount": 100
}
],
"billing_country_code": "SOME_COUNTRY_CODE",
"buyer_ip": "SOME_IP"
},
"private_token": "YOUR_PRIVATE_TOKEN"
}' \
https://api.taxamo.com/api/v1/tax/calculate | python -m json.tool