Has anyone found a good extension or solution for collecting sales tax in California? Our company has nexus in California. Taxjar keeps popping up but i am confused as to whether this is a free extension or signing up for a service. Thanks for any help!
1 Answer
I'll admit that it has been a year or so since I've looked, but the options have been:
- Manage all your sales taxes only in Magento. Good luck!
- Sign up with Avalara. I have no idea what this really entails because they refuse to publish information on their service without going through sales channels. This is a monthly paid service. What does it cost? Sounds like it depends on how much money you have. That said, it seems like a great service and they know very well how to handle tax collection/remittance.
- TaxJar. Seems like pretty much the same as Avalara without the elitist attitude. Probably more affordable as a result.
- TaxCloud. A free service. It sounds great on paper ... they handle remittance and all that, and it's free, but when I started going about building an integration with Magento, their API was so inflexible that we made a business decision to halt production.
- Build your own. Also, good luck! The technical details aren't that tough to grasp, the problem is getting your hands on the actual tax rates. I've been in contact with my state (Colorado) as well as some others. Washington actually will provide sales tax data on their .gov site, but I've not seen any others follow suit.
Developers and merchants need to be making noise about this. Contact your state legislators and tell them you are a merchant that wants to collect sales tax and you want to be in compliance but without data provided by the state to determine what sales tax you should collect on what orders, compliance is simply not practical. You shouldn't be forced to pay a third-party service in order to comply with the law. Most people call that extortion.
Of course, if you're like me, you would send those letters and simply never hear back.
