Your Simplified Solution to Tax Calculation and Management

While planning how to build your ecommerce site is exciting, it can also feel a bit overwhelming at times. With so much freedom, it can be hard to determine the basic elements needed to launch your online store.

To streamline the process of building your BigCommerce site, we’ve compiled the six essential components needed to successfully get your ecommerce store up and running.

In Part 3 of this blog series, we’ll cover how to set up your site to calculate and manage taxes.

Integrated and native tax management

Ensuring you appropriately tax your products is vital. Otherwise, your business could face severe penalties. Taxes can vary based on location and products, so we recommend integrating a tax management tool to accurately calculate fees and ensure you never miss a payment deadline.

Automated tax.

BigCommerce integrates with a variety of automated tax tools that calculate taxes at checkout and even file and submit documentation on your behalf. 

Using one of these tools significantly reduces the risk of miscalculation or missing a tax deadline. We recommend incorporating Avalara since it easily integrates into BigCommerce stores, offers several robust features designed to simplify taxes, and is reasonably priced. 

Avalara’s AvaTax sends real-time sales tax calculations to BigCommerce using geolocation to map multiple rates and rules to each transaction. Once you activate AvaTax within BigCommerce and set up your company profile, you can configure the setup to fit your unique business requirements for things like:

• Tax calculation settings for various tax types

• Exemption settings if you have exempt customers

• Product taxability settings for what you sell

To learn more about BigCommerce’s Avalara integration, explore this user guide.

While we recommend Avalara to new customers, BigCommerce also partners with several other robust tax management tools, so you can integrate the service that best suits your business.

Basic tax.

While we recommend using an automated tax service, some businesses have more basic needs — making it unnecessary to have such an advanced tool.

These brands can take advantage of BigCommerce’s native tax tool to manually calculate taxes based on location and product type. 

The final word

Accurately generating tax calculations and submitting forms on time is crucial to ensure your business runs smoothly. To help streamline your tax management, we recommend integrating Avalara. However, we offer several different tools so you can calculate and manage taxes the way that works best for your business.

View our Launch Foundations: Taxes video for a more detailed look at how to set up your ecommerce store to calculate and manage taxes. To learn about the other essential components of an ecommerce store, watch our Launch Foundations webinar series.