Customer story

Music marketplace automates sales tax calculations and returns

Results

Increased compliance
Integrated systems

Summary

Results

  • Increased compliance
  • Integrated systems

Tax challenges

  • Compliance risk
  • Tax complexity


Products used

Avalara AvaTax
Dynamically delivers sales and use tax calculations, based on the latest rules and rates in our tax engine, to a shopping cart or invoicing system at the time of purchase.

Avalara Managed Returns
Automatically gathers data from AvaTax to prepare and file sales and use tax returns and remit payments across multiple jurisdictions every filing cycle.


Benefits

  • Confident tax compliance across jurisdictions and regions
  • Flexible API for easy integrations and upgrades 
  • Support throughout implementation

Industry type

Software
Manage the varied requirements of where and how SaaS, software, and subscriptions are taxed.

Company overview


Customer
Discogs

Industry
Software

Discogs is on a mission to build the biggest and most comprehensive music database and marketplace, with discographies of all labels, all artists, all cross-referenced. Originally created as a hobby project in 2000, Discogs has become a definitive resource for physical music media such as vinyl and CDs, ranking just behind Amazon and eBay globally.

Tax challenges


The majority of states now hold marketplace platforms responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax for the transactions they enable. As a result of this type of legislation, Discogs suddenly had sales tax obligations in nearly every state in the U.S.

Why Avalara?


“Avalara proved to be a one-stop shop for the variety of advisory services we needed to automate our U.S. tax compliance efforts,” says Nick Haselwander, the company’s director of product. 

The engineering organization at Discogs dove into what it thought would be the daunting challenge of building an integration for its proprietary billing system.

Integration


“In my past lives, I’ve done a lot of integrations with some pretty nightmarish systems. Avalara was very, very easy. I had no trouble understanding the logic which was clear and consistent as we applied it across different endpoints,” says Joshua Provonchee, a Discogs software engineer. 

“In my experience a project such as this is challenging and can be time-consuming, but the integration to AvaTax was fast. I was actually a little confused by how little work we needed to do,” Nick agrees.

“The quality of Avalara’s support stood out more than anything, compared to past integrations I’ve done,” says Kian Dinyari, a Discogs senior software engineer. “It’s like dealing with another engineer in your own company. There’s no turf. They are totally invested in solving your problem.”

Kian and Joshua reported that the whole integration went very smoothly. “Everything worked shockingly fast,” says Joshua, “and their sandbox actually represents what you get in production, which isn’t always the case.”

Customer
Discogs

Industry
Software

Tax type
Sales and use

Integration
Proprietary marketplace system

Tax challenges

  • Compliance risk
  • Tax complexity

Products used

Avalara AvaTax
Dynamically delivers sales and use tax calculations, based on the latest rules and rates in our tax engine, to a shopping cart or invoicing system at the time of purchase.

Avalara Managed Returns
Automatically gathers data from AvaTax to prepare and file sales and use tax returns and remit payments across multiple jurisdictions every filing cycle.


Benefits

  • Confident tax compliance across jurisdictions and regions
  • Flexible API for easy integrations and upgrades 
  • Support throughout implementation

Industry type

Software
Manage the varied requirements of where and how SaaS, software, and subscriptions are taxed.

“In my past lives, I’ve done a lot of integrations with some pretty nightmarish systems. Avalara was very, very easy. I had no trouble understanding the logic, which was clear and consistent.”

—Joshua Provonchee
Software Engineer 

 

“In my past lives, I’ve done a lot of integrations with some pretty nightmarish systems. Avalara was very, very easy. I had no trouble understanding the logic, which was clear and consistent.”

—Joshua Provonchee
Software Engineer

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