Solving the Online Sales Tax Riddle

Collecting sales tax for online business is both incredibly complex and incredibly important. There are many ways to “figure out” online sales tax, but if your business doesn’t do everything just right—such as adjusting for varying sales tax rates as small as “local” tax levels in some places (more specific than “city” sales tax)—there can be serious repercussions.

Failure to collect sales tax where applicable can lead to fines or a tax audit. Even if you do collect sales tax, but don’t get every decimal or tenth of a percent in the right place, you can be in trouble. Tax rates and codes change frequently, and keeping up with the newest laws and what-have-yous is nearly impossible, especially if your online business has customers all across the country. To further complicate matters, there’s also been talk of a nationwide online sales tax, and some states have already made similar moves at a state level.

Many ecommerce sites with proprietary shopping carts have some sort of system in place to ensure that they apply and collect the appropriate sales tax for all their transactions. But what about smaller online businesses, those without the budget or manpower to constantly update and manage the tax codes in their shopping cart programs?

Businesses in that boat should check out AvaTax. It works with most cart systems, including Open Source carts that many small online retailers use to run their businesses. Unfortunately, Zen Cart, one of the most popular Open Source cart programs, doesn’t independently support AvaTax. Ecreativeworks offers AvaTax for sales tax automation with all of our website development services, and can set it up for you on your site, even if it uses Zen Cart. It’s fast, easy, accurate, and gives your site complete PCI compliance.

There are plenty of other sales tax programs out there—even some free ones. But few if any offer the level of coverage that AvaTax does. Running your business is hard enough without having to worry about sales tax calculations for every transaction. Give AvaTax a try—Ecreativeworks will be glad to help—and make your business a little easier.

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