Commerce AvaTax

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Dakota v. Wayfair opened the door to more tax obligations for sellers — and making sure you are charging the right tax rate in every state is hard. Avalara AvaTax helps by sending real-time sales tax calculations to your shopping cart. Drupal Commerce merchants can contact AvaTax to learn more.

This module has been certified by Avalara for both address validation and sales tax calculation via the AvaTax REST API v2. When customers enter their shipping address, it is validated for accuracy, and they will be prompted to correct it if a more accurate address is found.

Once the order has a shipping address, the order, customer, and product details are used to request and apply all applicable taxes to the order for any state or locality in the United States where a merchant has nexus. Upon checkout completion, the module will record the transaction as a SalesInvoice document in AvaTax unless you have disabled it (e.g. if you just need to estimate and collect taxes through your shopping cart but use another application to actually record completed transactions).

Avalara offers other services through its administrative interface, including automated filing, remittance, and exemption certificate management. Using the certified Commerce AvaTax module ensures you send all the information they need to give you full sales tax automation, boosting business productivity while minimizing audit risk.

Ready to give it a try? Contact Avalara for a sales consultation, and both their team and Centarro are available to support your implementation as needed.

Technical notes:

• This module is designed to work with the Commerce Shipping module on both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8/9. If you implemented a custom solution for collecting shipping addresses, you will need to alter the API requests to insert your address details where appropriate.
• When testing on localhost, you may need to configure SSL - AvaTax will reject any sales tax request that is not 100% secure.
• Finally, the 7.x-5.x branch is the most up to date version for Drupal 7, but it does not provide an upgrade path from the 7.x-4.x branch.