The following guest article is provided by Jordan Friedman, Director of Channel Development at Avalara. It is an excerpt from Avalara’s white paper entitled “Beyond the Shopping Cart”. In this article you will learn about how to approach sales tax requirements vis-à-vis your Miva Merchant shopping cart solution.
Your ecommerce shopping cart should integrate (through native or add-on capabilities) with the core functions of your business. Thereby it should support how you want to (or do) address customer acquisition, customer management, catalog management, customer communication and business systems. Each core task of the cart should integrate with key departments within an organization (either manually providing required information, or allowing integration and automation with business systems such as sales and marketing and accounting and/or compliance).
From an accounting and compliance perspective, the nuts and bolts of implementing an effective shopping cart solution can create synergies if done well, and mountains of additional tasks if not. Companies will be exposed to audit risk and customer complaints unless the shopping cart integrates with inventory, purchasing, catalog and fulfillment aspects of the business.
Calculating sales tax, shipping, and tracking exemption certificates correctly within the cart means finding a solution that integrates tax calculation and address verification, handles tax exempt transactions, manages exemption certificates, and so forth. As more and more states collect online sales tax, more and more ecommerce businesses will be required to remit it.
Automating the sales tax processes within your shopping cart solution addresses one of the key challenges facing ecommerce—how to accurately collect, file, and remit sales tax to the right jurisdiction at the right time. In the U.S. alone there are over 11,000 taxing jurisdictions, many of which (e.g., Florida, Texas, California) are requiring out of state ecommerce companies to collect sales tax for the first time. If the national effort to effectively end sales tax-free online shopping succeeds, the already difficult risk-prone sales tax problem will worsen. The solution? Automating the process with a cloud-based sales tax solution that resides within the shopping cart itself, or is easily added on. Once ecommerce merchants expand to global markets, VAT (Value Added Tax) adds another component to the tax rules puzzle. Sales, use, VAT rules and rates require a comprehensive transactional tax solution, one that integrates seamlessly with your shopping cart.
To learn more about this topic, visit https://www.avalara.com/.
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