Changing the default Tax Class for Magento Products

When adding products manually you will find that the Tax Class is, by default, set to ‘Please Select’.  You will need to choose if the product is taxable or not.  Since most products are indeed taxable, at least in your home state, it makes sense to change this default behavior so that the Tax Class is, by default, set to ‘Taxable’.

To do this we will need to open your database.  If you have cPanel on your hosting account or some other management software you will most likely have access to the Database Manager called phpMyAdmin.

1. Open your database and go to the table titled ‘eav_attribute’ or ‘mg_eav_attribute.
2. Once there scroll down until you see the column ‘tax_class_id’ and select ‘edit’.
3. Edit the ‘default_value’ it as follows:

   To keep it at Please Select, None: 0 
   To make it taxable, Taxable Goods: 2 
   To make it a Retail Customer, Retail Customer: 3 
   To make it shipping, Shipping: 4