Avalara TrustFile | Reviews

Horrible app. Stopped working at some point and we lost tens of thousands in uncollected sales tax.

If I could give Avalara zero stars I would. I just wanted to sign up for the free trial to see how it worked. First of all, it's a horribly designed non user friendly application that isn't actually made for Shopify. I had no idea where to start upon logging in. After that, I just wanted to find out how much it would cost. They are not transparent about the fee structure and the services you actually get. Even the sales rep wouldn't give me pricing and details without wasting my time setting up a zoom call and was extremely arrogant. Their chat support team, and their sales rep was also dishonest about the ability to auto-exempt Amazon orders feature. The feature did not work and I found no documentation about it. Also - half the support documentation leads to broken links so if you need help setting things up you are on your own. After I decided to use TAXJAR (A MUCH BETTER APPLICATION THAT SERVES THE SAME PURPOSE) I decided to try and cancel our Free Avalara Trial. I received some bogus "Cancellation Request Acknowledged" email saying that they had to "process" my cancellation and never received a follow up on whether or not my free trial was cancelled. I had to reach out to 3 different contacts at Avalara just to find out if we were infact cancelled from the free trial and not about to be billed. I wasted more time and energy just trying to cancel this horrifying service than I did setting up my entire sales tax reporting workflow in TaxJar. Horrible company, arrogant sales team, poor customer service, and unskilled app developers. DO NOT USE AVALARA. I WOULD RATHER FILE MY SALES TAX MANUALLY THAN GIVE THIS HORRIBLE COMPANY OUR BUSINESS.

when I click on backend app it is showing me blank page . I reached out to support but it's been 3 days and no updates yet. @Avalara, please let me know asap. thanks,

As business owners we know customer service can make or break our business. So far customer service has been lacking big time and I am only on the trial phase. I really believe the owner of Avalara is not paying attention to the customer service portion of his business. I pray it get better for his sake and ours or I may have to find help elsewhere.

It's really an awful company. I do not recommend using Avalara. They told me we reached economic nexus in NJ. After I paid for them to register us, and after collecting thousands of dollars in taxes from customers, a customer told me that NJ does not collect sales tax on clothing. My store only sells clothing. Ava tax told me that I should have consulted a tax professional. Honestly, I don't even know what service they provide.

If you have any stores connected to your Shopify (Amazon, ebay, etc.) do not sync with this app. If you have Trustfile syncing with Amazon directly it can determine the the taxes that are remitted directly by Amazon. If those orders come through the Shopify integration Trustfile will treat the orders as shopify orders and record them as tax that is due to the state. This not only doubles your taxes from the duplicate orders recorded, it also does not allow for taxes already remitted via amazon to be accounted for. I have spent weeks on this issue and finally received the only work around by avalara, recommending not using this app to synchronize the transactions.

Here is the final response from Avalara on my ticket:

I researched the issue and unfortunately, you were given misinformation. There's no way to exclude transactions from syncing into TrustFile, because it's a pure sync - all data goes in. AvaTax allows for that but not TrustFile.

The workaround would involve importing your Shopify transactions, less the Amazon transactions, into AvaTax instead of syncing.

Let me know if you have additional questions.

Athena

This app and the support are beyond terrible. I signed up for the free trial and ran the report for Q1. It only pulled in data for March. I called customer support and after being on hold for a long time they said they are not sure what happened and they would call me back. It has been 3 weeks and I have left multiple emails and messages and nobody responds. They have taken terrible service to a new level.

Revised 5/8/2019 I have updated my star rating from 2 to a 3 because I found a representative, Heather Lawrentz, that was extremely helpful and tried her hardest to fix some of our issues for us, one issue they can't fix so this is why I rated it at a 3. If you run all your transactions into shopify from ebay, amazon, etsy and so on for inventory control Trustfile can't tell those transactions are Marketplace Facilitators and it imports all the orders as shopify orders so it doesn't exempt those transactions from your taxes owed to each state. You can add some Marketplaces separately to sync into Trustfile but then you have to delete the duplicated orders or turn off shopify sync and manual add your shopify online orders and some Marketplaces using a CSV file from the way I understand it. Hopefully this is something they can change in the future but I doubt it. I am still not happy with their customer service as a whole but if you get someone like, Heather Lawrentz, you'll get pretty good help, it seems like the luck of the draw at Trustfile for the kind of customer service you receive, but this may improve as they've been around longer.

Old Review
I've been using this app since the beginning of the year and the app is just okay but the service really SUCKS!!!!! If you have any questions or concerns about the tax forms or anything like that don't think it's going to be easy to get a hold of someone. I've sat on hold over the phone twice in the last couple of weeks for over 45 minutes each time only to hang up, I did leave our information for them to call us back one other time and it took over 24 hours to hear from them, today I tried to call back twice and the line was busy both times, guess they have a lot of people on hold, I sat on chat before for over 2 hours with never getting a response, and my problems still haven't been addressed. We do have account manager but all his contact information is incorrect so I decided to email him with our concerns about 3 weeks ago and still haven't heard back from him. Bottom line is don't use this product if you're going to have questions or concerns that need to be addressed immediately or if you don't have general knowledge of tax forms and adjustments.

In my home state it can be cumbersome to keep up with changes in sales tax rates. Since I started using Trustfile, I have not had to deal with the quarterly stress of filing a sales tax return. It's a simple, straightforward platform that saves me a ton of time so I can focus on more important objectives. The value added is well worth the price.

Avalara TrustFile simplified one of the hardest parts of being a small business owner - dealing with sales tax. There are so many nuances for different regions, and I for one didn't want to risk getting it wrong. With a few clicks in TrustFile, I was able to generate an accurate return and get it filed. I would highly recommend integrating the Avalara TrustFile app into your Shopify store. The two work seamlessly together. I'm thankful that I don't have to worry about my sales tax anymore and can focus on revenue-driving, community-building and customer service initiatives instead.