TaxCloud TIC Search endpoint helps you find the correct Taxability Information Codes (TICs) for your products. It uses semantic matching to return the most relevant tax classification codes based on a product description, category name, or search term. As a result, you don’t need to know the exact TIC taxonomy to find the right code.
Every product in TaxCloud needs a TIC to determine how it’s taxed across different states. Assigning the wrong TIC can lead to over-collection or under-collection of sales tax.
TIC Search eliminates the guesswork by letting you describe your product in plain language and receive ranked results with confidence scores. This is especially useful when:
Make a POST request to the TIC Search endpoint with a product description:
The response returns the top matches, ranked by relevance:
In this example, TIC 20010 (Clothing) is the top result with a score of 0.984, the correct classification for a cotton t-shirt.
Each result in the results array contains:
The response also includes:
TIC Search returns standard error responses, in a format consistent with all other TaxCloud API endpoints.
Example error response:
Cold starts
On rare occasions, the first request after a period of inactivity may return a
503status with aRetry-After: 60header. Simply retry the request after the indicated interval, subsequent requests will respond normally.
If you’re onboarding a large catalog, you can call TIC Search for each product and use the top-ranked result to assign TICs programmatically. For most products, the rank-1 result will be the correct classification.
For high-confidence matches (e.g., score above 0.9), you can auto-assign the top TIC. For lower-confidence or ambiguous results, flag those items for manual review.
If you’re building a product management UI where merchants classify their own products, you can use TIC Search as the backend for a search-as-you-type experience. Send the merchant’s input as the query parameter and display the results for them to choose from.
Run your current product descriptions through TIC Search and compare the top result against the TIC you currently have assigned. If they differ, it may be worth reviewing whether the original assignment is still correct, especially if TaxCloud has added more specific TIC categories since the original classification.
limit=1 to minimize response payload size. For use cases where you want to present options to a user, limit=5 or limit=10 provides a good range.