As a Magento merchant, you have likely encounterd a tangled mess of sales tax obligations when you sell to customers in various jurisdictions and states. If you’ve tried to set up your cart to calculate the sales tax rates and variables across your catalog for thousands of jurisdictions – you know this is a huge expenditure of time and is ultimately error-prone; this adds risk to your bottom line. InteractOne is an active development partner with Avalara for Magento eCommerce merchants. Avalara products offer merchants the prospect of tax compliance with cloud-based transactional tax solutions that free you from having to become a sales tax expert.
Avalara AvaTax allows Magento merchants to automate sales tax calculations within the cart, based on the customer’s purchase location. We have found that this Magento extension provides the most accurate and affordable way to calculate sales tax within Magento. Secondly, it removes any need for regional limits you may have placed on selling based on perceived tax complications. And finally, the extension generally works well and is not a resource hog on your cart or checkout pages; maintaining speed on these transactional steps is a huge factor in conversion.
How AvaTax Works
AvaTax also helps you manage exemption certificates, file returns, and remit payments across numerous tax regions. The tool calculates rates based on more than 100,000 rules in thousands of locations and applies them within Magento to every transaction.
Magento and Avalara AvaTax integrate via their API’s, calling on powerful logic sets to deliver a host of features and preserve the flexibility of your cart and checkout configurations.
Merchants who use the Avalara AvaTax integration with Magento will benefit from more complete information and a better view into the transaction processes. There is no “batching” process – all of the rules are applied instantly, reducing any possible inventory discrepancies as well as nearly eliminating any ongoing IT issues with your Magento database – related to the extension. Transactions become searchable by document code and type, customer vendor code, and more, all sortable by invoice. The AvaTax interface enables Magento merchants to explore a lot more detail in researching jurisdictional tax rates – and which ones were applied to each transaction.