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Customer reviews: Avalara AvaTax

Develop by Elite

Reviews (28)

Overall rating
1.7

ach...com

Feb 22, 2025  on Bigcommerce

give a zero if I could - cannot login, no response from support, have had customers been checking out without sales tax being implied and us not knowing about it unless we see the invoice (varies by state). e-commerce is becoming a real PIA

sup...com

Feb 16, 2025  on Bigcommerce

Misleading pricing - go elsewhere - While the service functions as it should, their pricing is incredibly misleading. After one year of service, we got a new bill saying we owed over 10x the agreed upon rate. When I repeatedly tried to get clarification, one rep told me that they had discontinued the lower tier service and everyone was upgraded to the higher plan, but if I didn't want it just don't sign the contract. I followed that advice but continued to get bills saying we owed thousands of dollars that I never agreed to. I finally got a meeting with a rep only to be pitched a new service add on for thousands of more dollars without addressing the original issue. No thanks. I see other reviews about their bait & switch pricing so I know we are not alone.

ada...com

Jan 14, 2025  on Bigcommerce

Horrible Service - Bait and Switch Pricing - I've been in eCommerce for 17yrs and had learned about Avalara products at trade shows over the years. When we started getting non function and no response from TaxJar support, I chose Avalara as their replacement. I knew the cost would be significant, but assumed with that would come the best product and excellent service. I could not have been more wrong. I found myself in a bait and switch operations with rude, condesending, and/or totaly inept account managers (5 in < 1yr). Their API billing system is rediculous. They have you estimate "order" volume but then bill on API calls, which in our experience was about 30% higher. Your account rep is there not to help you but to try to charge you more whenever possible. And then to cap it off constant failures of the software itself. I've been trying to get a copy of my paid invoices for two weeks now. Learn from my mistake and look elsewhere. What a dissapointing and terrible experience working with Avalara has been!

bo....com

Sep 30, 2024  on Bigcommerce

Absolutely horrible - I've used Avalara from the start of my website going from a few hundred orders to thousands. Avalara automatically upgraded my package to include more documents but surcharged me 1000% for the documents, what originally cost $.22 a document became $1.22. They do not have any numbers to call to speak with someone and customer service will only call back randomly, mostly when I am closed. Do not use this company they are a scam.

nat...com

Aug 21, 2024  on Bigcommerce

Terrible App - I've used Avalara for a couple years now and have had so many issues in incorrect setup and calculations after they helped get it set up in the first place. Apart from incorrect reports and collecting happening, the third element of a recurring billing software (Rebillia), made the issue even worse. Avalara refused to "flip the switch" to allow Rebillia to connect and when I talked to Rebillia was told that it's very easy and they are likely just wanting more money. After being promised they wouldn't bill me more, I get double invoiced one month and then charged additional connector fees. I collect almost as much in tax as I have to pay for Avalara, the price is just absurd and their service has been terrible. It took months of working with them to get my account functioning at 90% and I still have issues I have to work around. Very unhappy with them and it's impossible to get in touch with someone that is either competent or that can fix the problem. Again, apart from technical issues, they increased their billing and began charging for connections they never used to charge for (Rebillia) and (BigCommerce)

dee....au

Jul 19, 2024  on Bigcommerce

Absolute Con Artists - Never having written a negative review ever, I have to say what a negative experience it has been to deal with Avalara. Take it or leave it was the response when the fee increased by a factor of 10+. The continual bullying emails that have followed since are another reason for the review. The fact that they make shutting the account down such a long winded process is proof, if proof were needed, about the intentions of this company.Update: Our solicitors are working on this as the agreement is not valid. emails to the Avalara service team are bouncing. 'The recipient's mailbox is full and can't accept messages now. Please try resending your message later, or contact the recipient directly.' Really Avalara!!

bry...com

May 23, 2024  on Bigcommerce

Why is my bill going from $170 to $1,634? - Literally the largest increase in a service bill I've seen in my entire career. Wrote in to confirm it wasn't a mistake. Response was take it or leave it. Avalara was acquired by a private equity company. They are doing the standard age-old playbook of raising prices, reducing the quality of the product and making customer support non-existent. Run away from this company. There are a few alternatives that you can find on the BC marketplace.

hel...com

Apr 30, 2024  on Bigcommerce

Would give 0 star if I could! - DO NOT USE THIS APP! Terrible customer service. It's very complex and confusing to set up. You don't have a dedicated account manage to help you get all set. We ended up giving up. Unbeknownst to us, they still kept billing us for API calls, whatever the heck that even means. We ended up getting charged for over $5,000!!! We never even set the app up fully, we couldn't even log into it because the reset password link is broken (and has been broken for MONTHS). Customer service has been a NIGHTMARE trying to get these charges explained to us and refunded. They only care about duping their customers and charging ridiculous amounts of money. It's also extremely hard to cancel your account. The cancellation form does not work, I tried multiple times and always got error messages. Finally I got them to cancel my account via emails so I wouldn't be billed again. Still fighting these bogus ridiculous charges with my credit card company. Stay away from this horrible scam of a company. Use TaxJar instead! They are awesome and so affordable!

and...com

Apr 26, 2024  on Bigcommerce

Good Product - Terrible Support - Impossible to talk to a live person. They won't return phone calls or emails.

ewr...net

Mar 19, 2024  on Bigcommerce

Poor service, high price - Have used this app for our Bigcommerce tax calculations for 9 years. They have changed for the worse. When you set up an account for this type of integration, you don't get an account manager, which means you don't get support. We used to have one, now it's impossible to get an answer in under three weeks. Pricing is also insane now. They got rid of their small business, API-only pricing tier which Bigcommerce integration made use of. Now, you're billed as a full customer. Almost 5K for a small business.

vwd...com

Dec 06, 2023  on Bigcommerce

Once they have your money your on your own - There website documentation is very poor, its bundled in an attractive professional way but is irrelevant to what you need to do. There support is worthless not even sure they train them as they were unable to answer simple setup questions. Definitely not worth anywhere close to what they charge. With the fact that it has non-existent support and the online manuals are generic and pointless should almost be freeware.

ric....uk

Oct 23, 2023  on Bigcommerce

SCAM COMAPNY - We signed the agreement to go ahead with their services, they cancelled the IOSS, and we thought it was the whole thing cancelled, did not hear anything for a whole year.They now want us to pay over £3K for a service we never had from them.OK we did sign the agreement, and we should have taken more notice, however they had no problem in NOT contacting us to set up their service!

arc...com

Aug 17, 2023  on Bigcommerce

Good but the app issues... - I love the idea of this app but there is a lot of issues with the connection to reports or if you have other avalara accounts it stays logged in. It's very frustrating so its best to just log into the avalara website itself to pull reports you need,

cus...com

Jun 03, 2023  on Bigcommerce

Horrible, horrible, horrible - Wow, where do I even begin? The software is buggy and takes a lot of trial and error to get to work. The support, though, takes the cake. It's absolutely atrocious. Do NOT use Avalara!

you...com

Apr 25, 2023  on Bigcommerce

DON'T Get This App!!! - WORST service ever!!! I've been filing support tickets for over a month! No reply, and now they are trying to bill me and they can't even service my account. Worthless!

inf...com

Apr 17, 2023  on Bigcommerce

Support - They said, they checked the settings and everything is ok. But the did NOT check. My accountant saw the big settings error. And they are NOT refunding my money after i applied to cancel. RUN away from this APP. Never think a second and waste your time. They don't even deserve 1 star.

sar...com

Apr 13, 2023  on Bigcommerce

Worthless App - Installed this app. Authorized a charge of $100, they charged more. App is absolutely useless. Setup everything and confirmed it was setup. Doesn't charge tax anywhere. Contacted them four times with no response. Do not use this app!

bas...com

Jan 13, 2023  on Bigcommerce

Cancelled Account Without Notice and No Support - We have been Avalara for a year and a half and then out of the blue the account was cancelled. We spoke with customer support on 3 occasions in a 3 week period. Each time we were told if was being escalated and that we would get a call back. At no point have we received a call back.

gla...com

Jan 12, 2023  on Bigcommerce

Overall - To start i normally don't leave reviews good or bad. We just finished our first year trial. It stopped working a few weeks ago prior to the trial ending.They canceled our subscription to try and fix it, now i have a quote on my desk with a hefty activation charge. Also for any one using the pick up instore feature of BC, avalara will calculate tax based on the ship to address which the customer puts their own address in, but dont worry, they can create a rule for you. When the shipping method line is blank they will base tax on the ship from address. All for a onetime 5k fee. Seems to me BC offers instore pickup and avalara sees the item isnt shipping. One of the two should have this fixed. All in all it worked great at first. Setup was a little confusing. I tried to sign up for the file returns for me service, paid and never could get it to work. it said i had to upload a form but in the drop down box of forms there was not a form for my state. The support i have had has been terrible. Like i said, down two weeks or more and i have talked to about 6 different people who keep marking the cases solved. I think this service is a must for ecommerce but not sure if there is a better one out there.

sch...com

Dec 30, 2022  on Bigcommerce

Essential for collecting tax at scale, but beware of API Calls and Pricing - As others have noted this app requires an expert user to get rolling. Once in place is works great and makes tracking and filing returns in multiple states very easy. A few major concerns - 1. Pricing - They will offer a significantly discounted first year. Those discounts expire and you should expect to get hammered in the years that follow. 2. API Calls - API calls count toward usage (10 to 1), so 100 calls is 10 transactions. Sounds ok right? Wrong. Out of the box BigCommerce will hit the Avalara API up to 4 times for one transaction or user in the sales funnel - twice in the cart and twice in checkout. This means API calls rack up about 3-4x faster than you expect. This can be addressed through theme customization, but will take a developer. We blew through our planned annual usage in about 4 months before we realized how out of control the API calls were. If you have decent traffic you need to customize when calls are being made to avoid huge usage waste and cash burn.

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