Avalara and WooCommerce Partner for Real-Time Sales Tax Calculations

Avalara, Inc., a provider of tax compliance automation for business, and WooCommerce, an eCommerce platform powered by WordPress, have announced an extension of their partnership to streamline and improve sales tax management for businesses on the WooCommerce platform.

“We chose to work with Avalara, because they have a proven track record of delivering the best tax compliance solutions for business,” said Joel Bronkowski, chief business development officer of WooCommerce. “Avalara has been a terrific partner in helping Woo’s e-merchants effectively manage their tax compliance obligations.”

Avalara’s Compliance Cloud platform automatically validates addresses, determines taxability and rates, and delivers instantaneous tax calculations within the Woo shopping cart at checkout for 200 supported countries. Additionally, the Avalara integration will now feature active updating, maintenance and support for WooCommerce 2.3 and later releases. The update is automatically included for all users and features:

A more intuitive user experience
Efficiencies in tax code creation by category
Detailed levels of control on tax code variants
More reliable address validation
Customizable tax exemptions, with the ability to update by customer
Comprehensive refund support

“We are leveling the playing field for small and mid-size e-merchants, giving them a real-time, automated tax solution for the Magic Moment of ecommerce,” said Marshal Kushniruk, executive vice president of global business development at Avalara. “Avalara enables business owners to accurately calculate the right tax for the right product at the right time, right in the shopping cart. It’s a huge win for our mutual customers.”

For businesses of all kinds and sizes, calculating and collecting sales tax for each transaction can be challenging, because tax rules, regulations, exceptions and exemptions vary widely by product, state, district, and even county or neighborhood. With Avalara, merchants can automatically, accuractely access the most current sales tax information required to generate an invoice. Because Avalara is cloud software, its tax engines are constantly updated with the latest rules, regulations, tax holidays and other important tax compliance content.

“We have an ecommerce site and are required to collect sales tax for sales to 13 states,” said Dan Martin, server administrator at Caliper Coporation. “The AvaTax plugin for WooCommerce allows us to correctly apply sales tax in the applicable jurisdictions within our store.”