Main Street Fairness Act

[titlehere]

Looks like another internet sales tax bill in the works. I've heard of taxcloud.net, but what other ideas are any of you having if this type of bill is implemented?

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Main Street Fairness Act

Avalara is the "big" enterprise level one in the space, and they have a Miva Merchant integration.

AccurateTax.com is more focused on the SMB space and was developed by NetBlazon and they've been super longtime Miva Merchant developers.

[wcw]

Re: Main Street Fairness Act

I must be missing something. How are the guys at taxcloud.net doing this for free? They said Miva Merchant is planned. Does that mean they have contacted somebody at Miva Merchant?

[titlehere]

Re: Main Street Fairness Act

How can it be free, you might ask?

The states that are members of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement recognize that collecting local sales tax is a challenge, even in the new streamlined tax environment. By creating the Certified Service Provider program, the states have made it possible for trusted third parties to create technical solutions that effectively manage tax collection and remittance.
As a Certified Service Provider, we are compensated by participating states for providing TaxCloud to merchants. Because TaxCloud was intended from the very beginning to be a CSP service, we designed it with these fundamental goals in mind:

1. TaxCloud must be able to scale to meet the demands for every transaction underway on the internet at any given moment, and
2. TaxCloud must be able to operate on only the states' prescribed CSP compensation allowance.

We have built TaxCloud as an extremely cost-efficient, yet highly scalable, web-services based system, so that we can provide our tax calculation and remittance services at no cost to merchants.

Looks like they're making deals with state government?

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Main Street Fairness Act

Yep, they're making deals with the states to get a piece of the revenue (in theory).

We have spoken to them, at this point the ball is in there court. For this type of Partnership, we generally require that they do the initial integration and get some live clients, and effectively prove their longevity.

Frankly we've been around too long and had too many partners (some with good ideas even) come and then go out of business or at least stop paying their bills and then we're stuck with old, legacy and possibly broken code that we have to maintain on our dime at the expense of focusing on our core product.

So Taxcloud has an interesting idea and business model, time will tell if it works. If it catches on and we think they'll be around for a long time, then you may see a direct integration from us at that point.

In the meantime we recommend Accurate Tax or Avalara depending on your specific business or needs.