July 29, 2020

Avalara, worst choice ever for sales tax. They didn't build their own software, fired the team that did and now they don't know how it works. You won't be able to get any tech support. 4 months of lies and they never got my API working.

Item: Avalara
Rating: 1
Author: Eric Bernstein

Eric Bernstein

CTO

Spectrum BoutiqueRetail, 1-10 employees

Score 1 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Modules Used

AvaTax
Returns

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We purchased a license to Avalara to handle our sales tax collection and file our returns. We use it for all of our sales. It's suppose to be a seamless integration with Magento 2.

Pros and Cons

It seems like it will work.
They promise you they can make it work.
It eventually will partly work, maybe...

They didn't build their own software.
They don't know how the technology works or how it will integrate into Magento 2.
They are rude and resist getting you to their tech department, because they haven't established who is supporting their own product.
They just added a department to manage their software, but unfortunately they expect you to wait as a customer until they learn it.
I spent 5 months with them and they never got any part of their integration to work smoothly.
They billed me for every month and even after we spent thousands of dollars switching to a different tech, they continue to bill us, even after they agreed to refund us our money.

Return on Investment

We have lost thousands of dollars in the installation of the program.
We have been penalized for 4 months of unfiled taxes in 4 states.
We have spent hundreds of employee hours working on the problems.
We had to spend thousands more to remove the product and install a new one.

It was literally impossible for the Avalara team to integrate their product with the newest version of Magento 2.3.4 The product was built for the previous version of Magento and they didn't have the skill base to update it. So if you have the current version of Magento you are going to have a problem.

Usability

I was never able to use the product and neither were they. They weren't able to get the order sync to work consistently. No one from the Avalara team was able to tell me what was wrong. They couldn't figure out the problem. I spoke with at least 5 different agents.

Additional Capabilities

Avalara Returns

Since we couldn't get the software to work, we were never able to file a return and were fined by 4 states for multiple months. Super great!

Alternatives Considered

Taxify

Taxify involves much more do it yourself development. So the start up price is around $3-4k in dev time, but then it's 1/4 of the price of Avalara andddddd IT WORKS!!!!! Calculating sales tax is not a very complicated thing really. I mean I guess it can get complicated but our business is very very simple. Taxify works perfectly, their support is ACES, their tech knows the product in and out. It has already filed returns for us. EVERYTHING IS BETTER NOW! Also down the road, we are going to save thousands of dollars a year using them. If we grow very large then we can just move to SOVOS who is a much more respected company than Avalara. Mostly I'm upset I ever went with Avalara. I just want my money back at this point as we agreed.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would never recommend Avalara to anyone who uses Magento. They are unfamiliar with their own platform, let alone Magento. They have no idea how their own API works. I got conflicting tech support every single time I called. I was given the number of the firm that originally built their product, Classy Llama, and when I called them, they were so fed up with Avalara and told me terrible things about working for them. They offered to fix my problem with the integration for $5000. In months of working with Avalara they were never able to sync any part of their API. Not only did the most basic part of their extension not work, their address validation component broke our cart. Eventually they told me they would not support my installation, when they realized that they had no idea how to. They offered me a refund and now its been 3 months trying to get them to refund my installation while they continue to charge me for future services. I can't get my rep to respond for almost 2 months. I finally got them to remove the current charge, but they refuse to reply to me about the original charge.