When making purchases in the iTunes Store in the United States, if you use a card for payment and your billing address is in certain states that charge taxes on digital products, the apps, in-app purchases, music, and ebooks you buy in the iTunes Store may be subject to taxation.
You can change the billing address of your card to an address in a tax-free state, but both the bank and the merchant may perform an AVS check to confirm if the address you provided matches the one associated with your card at the bank.
Some credit cards issued by certain banks do not seem to perform AVS checks, but debit cards do undergo AVS checks. This includes:
- American Express credit cards and charge cards
- Capital One credit cards
These cards can be successfully linked to the iTunes Store with any billing address.
For banks that enforce AVS checks, you cannot directly use a tax-free state address for your card, but you can use the tax system in the iTunes Store to avoid this.
The iTunes Store allows you to add multiple payment methods, and it will automatically use the next payment method if the previous one is not available. Additionally, the iTunes Store only uses the billing address of the first card payment method to determine the tax situation. Therefore, you can use a payment method, such as Apple Cash, that allows you to freely enter a billing address without being disabled due to multiple payment failures.
Activating Apple Cash does not require providing an SSN or ID, although not providing this information will limit the functionality of Apple Cash. However, the purpose of this article is not to use Apple Cash for payments.
After activating Apple Cash, ignore the prompts to verify your identity and directly open "Payment & Shipping," then adjust the order of Apple Cash to be the first (excluding Apple Account Balance).
Since Apple Cash is a service provided by Apple, they are aware that there is no available balance in your Apple Cash account when processing purchases, so they will automatically skip this payment method. However, Apple Cash is indeed a VISA debit card (all older versions of Discover debit cards have been updated to VISA debit cards), so the billing address of Apple Cash will be used to calculate the tax situation.