Avalara

Overall a poor experience, which is a shame because the software itself is good. However, the massive expense and poor customer service are a huge con and I would not recommend this company to anyone in the future.

It was great for 3 years as we assumed they were doing their job of tax assessment and tax returns well but the house of cards began to fall when we started getting notices from State entities that our taxes had been filed incorrectly for YEARS.

I contacted Avalara well before launching my store; we were just commencing the development. I communicated this to the sales representative and all he focused on was about how this was ideal because I had no footprint and I would be properly set up from the beginning. However, at no point did it tell me clearly what were the things I needed to have in order before implementing Avalara, nor did he say at any point there was no reason to make the purchase until after the launch of the store since I had no sales and therefore no threshold would be surpassed. For this reason I went about 8 months without using the platform until we were getting closer to the launch at which point I realized there was no support for implementation outside of a manual, that by the way, is outdated, no videos to explain to new entrepreneurs not only how to navigate the waters is compliance but how to properly use their system. Then there were compatibility issues between avalara and our system, though they say they are compatible with WooCommerce, if your platform is using any other plugins or apps it will cause issues, such as long delays in the check out process. I communicated this to the tech team and they acknowledged that they knew of some issues (so we aren’t the only ones), but they never even replied about remotely addressing this issue. In addition, I was sold on an idea that Avalara was the best system for international stores. This is disingenuous, since it won’t calculate and send you automatic warning when you’re going to cross any NEXUS outside of the US. This wasn’t clearly explained on the sales meeting and it should have since we are a Canadian Corporation and it wasn’t going to serve even our own jurisdiction.
In addition, it is not set up to configure locations of warehouses, so it calculates taxes according only to the location of the corporation, sending a warning to all clients outside of that country that they may have to pay duty charges upon receiving the goods. We were extremely careful of ensuring the most easy shopping experience for our clients, therefore we are working with warehouses in other countries like Mexico, to bring down shipping costs and take care of all duty charges so our clients don’t have to. But though we already paid the duties, Avalara was still posting a warning in our system during the check out process and though we explained our situation, they did nothing to accommodate this.
We had technical issues with syncing our products with Avalara, and this was already at the point when we were finally ready to launch our store. It took Avalara 2.5 months to provide a solution, which caused a delay in our launch and they were not even communicating during the process, no timeline was provided, not even an email to ask us to be patient. Nothing.
It is super expensive too, and though I never ended up actually using it (we did not launch our store with it) and due to all this frustrating issues met with indifference, we decided to cancel our contract and ask for a report nbirsement for the software that was never used, ensuring I mentioned that as a business owner, I was willing to negotiate a fair market value for the time spent with their engineer in the one meeting we had with him to explain our issues and the one meeting with the implementation specialist at the beginning, who sent us the manual to read, and took us through a general walkthrough of their platform, as well as all the HS codes we had received vs the ones we actually paid for. But they were unwavering due to their 60 day policy, which I sure went well o er since I purchased the service way before we were ready for launch, and all though I explained everything I stated above. Overall the worse experience in my life and I truly try to avoid saying any negative reviews unless I’ve exhausted every opportunity to make things right and the negative reviews are truly deserved. And I try to honour the good things they do have, which is what seems like a good product for more generic local companies within the US.

Very good overall. We encounter very few issues with Avalara given the quantity and complexity of our transactions.