Music marketplace automates sales tax calculations and returns

Discogs is on a mission to build the biggest and most comprehensive music database and marketplace, with discographies of all labels, all artists, all cross-referenced. Originally created as a hobby project in 2000, Discogs has become a definitive resource for physical music media such as vinyl and CDs, ranking just behind Amazon and eBay globally.

The majority of states now hold marketplace platforms responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax for the transactions they enable. As a result of this type of legislation, Discogs suddenly had sales tax obligations in nearly every state in the U.S.

“Avalara proved to be a one-stop shop for the variety of advisory services we needed to automate our U.S. tax compliance efforts,” says Nick Haselwander, the company’s director of product. 

The engineering organization at Discogs dove into what it thought would be the daunting challenge of building an integration for its proprietary billing system.

“In my past lives, I’ve done a lot of integrations with some pretty nightmarish systems. Avalara was very, very easy. I had no trouble understanding the logic which was clear and consistent as we applied it across different endpoints,” says Joshua Provonchee, a Discogs software engineer. 

“In my experience a project such as this is challenging and can be time-consuming, but the integration to AvaTax was fast. I was actually a little confused by how little work we needed to do,” Nick agrees.

“The quality of Avalara’s support stood out more than anything, compared to past integrations I’ve done,” says Kian Dinyari, a Discogs senior software engineer. “It’s like dealing with another engineer in your own company. There’s no turf. They are totally invested in solving your problem.”

Kian and Joshua reported that the whole integration went very smoothly. “Everything worked shockingly fast,” says Joshua, “and their sandbox actually represents what you get in production, which isn’t always the case.”