Our CEO, Erik Hansen, oversaw the architecture, design, and development of these projects while he worked for Classy Llama, an agency he co-founded in 2007. Avalara is not and has not been a Kraken client.
![](https://www.krakencommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/work_avatax_mark-withers.jpg)
Erik is a skilled and pragmatic technology/project manager. Over the past year, (starting in June 2018 to December of 2018) he successfully coordinated and communicated aspects of our software development project to create a next-generation Avalara AvaTax integration. This solution is available to online businesses of all sizes and complexity to help enable compliant B2B2C transactional tax calculations using Magento 2 and AvaTax. Using Avalara’s compliance platform and API’s, Erik led his team in all phases of software development and provided valuable usability input and a working solution. Erik and his team delivered to plan; he is a pleasure to work with and I would welcome the chance to work with Erik on challenging technical projects in the future.
Mark Withers
Technical Manager, Avalara
About AvaTax
Avalara AvaTax is a fast, easy, accurate, and affordable way to calculate sales tax, manage exemption certificates, file returns, and remit payments across multiple tax regions, on a global level.
The Need
Avalara needed an experienced team to build a connector between Magento 2 and their AvaTax service, as they didn’t have the capability in-house to build and support this connector.
The Solution
Erik led the team that built and supported the connector (although Avalara was not a direct client of Kraken during the development of this project). All development was done in-the-open on Github so that merchants and their implementation partners could see the status of issues, new features, etc.
Address Validation
Since AvaTax’s sales tax calculation engine relies on knowing a user’s exact location (rather than relying solely on their zip code), they run address validation on all shipping addresses.
If a user enters an invalid address, they will have the choice to accept the “suggested address” or stick with their “original address”.
Customs, Duty & Import Tax - Hiding for this reason: https://take.ms/QMo7r
AvaTax provides features to help merchants sell a B2C shipment of goods across country borders in an eCommerce environment by calculating what’s called the “landed cost.”
Integrated Magento’s checkout process with Avalara’s Customs, Duty & Import Tax so that customers who are placing orders across country borders can understand the total cost of receiving the order from the merchant. Learn more on Avalara’s website.
![](https://www.krakencommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/work_avatax_cdit.png)
![](https://www.krakencommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/work_avatax_document-management.png)
Document Management (CertCapture) - Hiding for this reason: https://take.ms/QMo7r
Avalara’s CertCapture functionality allows merchants to “Collect, store, manage, and renew tax documents from your vendors and buyers safely in the cloud, instead of dealing with a mess of digital or paper files.”
Added the ability for a customer to upload their tax exemption documentation in the checkout process which will allow them to checkout without taxes. Learn more on Avalara’s website.
Results
* The download count is not directly related to how many sites are using the extension, as each site will download the extension multiple times during development and upon each deployment.
![](https://www.krakencommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/work_avatax_julia-king.jpg)
Erik was an amazing resource and a very skilled engineer. His thoroughness and expertise were impressive. Having seen over 400 integrations built, his was one of the cleanest I’ve seen.