US-based Mast General Store has leveraged its partnership with retail software company Celerant and partnered with tax compliance provider Avalara . Via these collaborations, Mast General Store reportedly seeks to facilitate its multichannel operations and address tax requirements following the company’s plans to expand into new jurisdictions.

More precisely, according to the official press release, Mast General Store is leveraging its previous integration with Celerant to solve the tax requirements triggered by its omnichannel retail sales. The retailer’s choice to further leverage its collaboration with Celerant builds on its 2008 decision to use Celerant’s point-of-sale (POS) software and ecommerce solutions. However, as outlined in the press release, during the pandemic, the company had to switch to an ecommerce-first model by implementing Celerant’s Stratus product in a bid to enable ‘Best Store Fulfilment,’ an automated tool to fulfil orders from individual stores.

If partnering with Celerant enables the retailer to optimise its multichannel operations, the partnership with Avalara addresses another pain point for the company: economic nexus laws. These legal requirements impose tax collection on businesses depending on their level of economic activity in a state. In the case of nexus laws, the difficulty arises from the fact that each state defines the nexus thresholds differently.

As a result, to ensure compliance, businesses have to monitor the instances when they trigger tax obligations by reaching a specific level of sales and/or number of sales transactions in another state. To tackle this pain point, Mast General Store plans on leveraging two solutions: Avalara AvaTax and Avalara Returns, in an effort to meet the prerequisites for economic nexus in 14 states and fill tax returns for 11 states. This strategy banks on the fact that the retailer’s website sales are processed through AvaTax, which is reportedly regularly updated to reflect the changing rules and tax rates in the over 13,00 US sales and use tax jurisdictions.

Consequently, even if the company is selling into a state where it has yet to meet the local economic nexus threshold, it can forecast any forthcoming obligations if sales increase and potentially trigger nexus in other states. What do Celerant and Avalara bring to the table? Celerant Technology is a retail software provider that enables retailers to expand their businesses online. The company supports retailers by leveraging its all-in-one system that includes solutions such as point-of-sale, inventory management, promotions and loyalty rewards, ecommerce, mobile apps, vendor integrations, marketplace integrations, and integrated email marketing among others.

Earlier in 2023, the company revealed that it started a collaboration with consumer financing solution provider Sezzle in an effort to integrate Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) on its ecommerce platform. Avalara is a tax compliance automation software provider that spans a network of over 30,000 business and government customers in more than 90 countries. Its solutions reportedly leverage over 1,200 signed partner integrations across leading ecommerce, ERP, as well as other billing systems to enable tax calculations, document management, tax return filing, and tax content access.

Also in 2023, the company joined forces with eBay to address cross-border compliance for global sellers. Similarly, the tax compliance automation software provider launched an integrated sales tax calculator plugin for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. .