Overview
Avalara is a 3rd party tax provider that offers many additional benefits above our other tax methods. Avalara will provide real-time tax calculations for the shopping cart and order entry and using the Tax Code field on the product, Avalara can provide accurate tax rates for specific product types for regions that have very complex rules.
Avalara provides many advanced tax reporting features and will also handle paying your company's sales and use taxes to the appropriate agencies automatically, drastically reducing tax payment overhead.
Enabling Avalara
To enable Avalara,
- If you don't have one, signup for an account
- Navigate to Tools > Apps & Add-Ons > Avalara.
- Check Active On Store
- Enter License number
- Enter Account number
- Enter the same Company Code that is on Avalara's side.
- Enter API URL into the URL Field: https://avatax.avalara.net
Note: If using a sandbox login, use the URL: https://development.avalara.net - Enter States to tax. Use the two-letter abbreviation for states separated by commas with no spaces.
How it Works
Upon closing an order (via setting an order to an order status that is flagged as "closed" in the Order Statuses editor), AmeriCommerce will notify Avalara to commit the tax amount for the order to their database, and this can be disabled on the setup under Tools > Apps & Add-Ons > Avalara.
Note: Here are the order status conditions that will cause tax data to commit to Avalara:
- Orders that are marked Shipped
- Orders that are Open, but paid off (such as "Approved pending shipping")
- Orders that are not open (closed) and not declined or cancelled
- Orders that are not open (closed) and not Fully or partially returned.
Note: Customs/Duty fee calculations/estimation is not currently a part of the AmeriCommerce integration.