Avalara will set you up for maximum usage volume even if that's not what you need.

Poor understanding of and lack of interest in addressing customer needs: We are in the medical device and capital equipment industry. We have highly valued products being sold at a lower volume. When we implemented Avalara, the company recommended system set up that will generate maximum usage volume even though it was not needed. The recommended setup caused our system to call on Avalara's system for address validation when each line is entered into sales order or invoice while what we really needed is to validate the address upon invoicing for the entire invoice since we never ship/bill to multiple locations within one invoice.As a result, on the days when we only had a few invoices, we will see thousands of address validations in usage volume report and we are being charged at this volume.

Poor Customer Service: When we tried to appeal our case, we were told that the billing is based on terms and conditions of the agreement, and if we don't like it, we don't have to use Avalara and we should look into competitor products. No vendor should talk to their customer in this manner.

Poor business ethics: during the first year of subscription, Avalara billed us by invoicing volume which was our understanding of the agreement as well. At the end of the first year, Avalara account manager confirmed that we did not use all the capacity we purchased and as a result, we purchased the next tier down the scale. Toward the second half of the 2nd year, a new account manager informed us that of usage volume and charge based on address validation at line level for each sales order and invoice line, which is not at all necessary in our B2B Capital Equipment business. When we challenged such inconsistency in interpretation of contractual terms, Avalara management responded that it's legitimate per terms and conditions in the contract. So we learned. The terms and conditions in the contract have room for interpretation to Avalara's liking.

In addition, when we spoke to an Avalara support engineer about our system setup, he confirmed that the setup recommended by the Avalara implementation team is not necessary for our business and expressed his willingness to explain to the Avalara account manager. When we communicated his technical assessment to the account management team, they refused to take that into consideration and insisted on billing us at the higher volume and higher price.