Working with a customs partner can open your business to more sales, avoid customs clearance complications, and make returns easier to manage. As a result, online retailers experience more efficient operations and higher customer satisfaction. Your customs clearance partner should meet the following five criteria:

1. Provide transparent integration and processing fees

The goal of a good partner is to make customs processes easier for e-commerce merchants. Choose a partner who not only handles import and export customs clearance but also provides transparency regarding the fees you can expect for those services. The benefits for online retailers are well worth the costs incurred and it allows cross-border shippers to capitalize on growing markets within and outside the EU.

VAT reporting is often perceived to be a routine process easily manageable through a manual, spreadsheet driven process. However, if you breakdown this process in individual steps and take a closer look, it becomes apparent that the overall process can be quite time-consuming and requires specific knowledge.

If you then add business and regulatory changes to the equation, managing your global indirect tax reporting can become a daunting task.

Whatever a retailer’s size, product offerings or channel, sales and use tax compliance is an essential part of business operations. But with thousands of tax jurisdictions in the U.S. and shifting definitions of what constitutes a nexus, compliance processes can prove complex even for sophisticated merchants — and a truly difficult challenge for any size business.

Sales and use tax compliance applications that are seamlessly integrated with retail operating solutions can effectively meet these challenges for retailers while still providing more timely and accurate data, along with signature-ready returns and up-to-date exemption certificates.

Although ecommerce sales are expected to be higher than last year, people are also returning to brick-and-mortar shops. Shoppers aren’t necessarily waiting around for special sales events anymore, and will start their shopping when it works for them. The Avalara Peak sales season guide can help you anticipate earlier shoppers, offer better buying experiences, and manage global tax compliance.

This guide covers:

Go beyond the basics of VAT and learn about simplified compliance schemes, e-invoicing and real-time reporting, and import VAT. Learn about common VAT challenges in our guide to cross-border VAT.

This guide covers:

The VAT story so far: Find out more about the history and development of VAT, including recent changes to VAT systems around the world.

The rise of simplified compliance: Learn more about which countries have simplified compliance systems (and what they do) in this guide.

We welcome that the EU Commission has proposed new rules on Single VAT registration as part of the VAT in the Digital Age proposal . The new rules will remove the requirement for businesses to VAT register in each EU country where they store inventory and from which they sell to local customers. This will significantly simplify VAT obligations for businesses, especially SME’s, as it reduces the need for costly, time-consuming and often prohibitive VAT registrations to sell and store across the EU.

10 years ago the cost of selling internationally was so high that it constituted an enormous risk to businesses that many were simply not prepared to take.  Cross border trading is more important than ever. With growing competition and restricted domestic opportunities, the real risk to merchants is choosing not to sell internationally. Today it’s 10x faster and 10x cheaper to go international, to the extent that now the real risk is NOT going international.

Retailers have never had more avenues to sell their products to new and returning customers. Multichannel sellers can meet these customers where they are, selling to them in-person at brick-and-mortar locations, from their own website, on social media, and through marketplaces big and small, in addition to wholesale.

While the opportunities to sell products are plentiful, merchants that use complex channel strategies – no matter the retail category or business model – also face cumbersome sales tax compliance obligations. It can be difficult to gain a full picture of your company’s financial health without tying in sales data from all those channels to create a single source of truth. The more products you sell in more states, the higher your potential for sales tax liability. Sellers can use this guide to gain a deeper understanding of how to stay ahead of their tax obligations while growing their business.