Avalara is charging California customers Alabama's tax rates

Fulfilment & Inventory
1

Hey team! Looking for some help before BFCM to solve a really bad tax bug.

My merchant uses Avalara to calculate taxes. They stock inventory in Alabama and their customers purchase products with Avalara adding the correct taxes at checkout. However, if I add a product post-purchase to the order and specify that I want the new product to be shipped from the same fulfillment order as the rest of the order … Avalara charges my customers Alabama’s tax rates and California’s taxes rates.

Technical Details:

  • Endpoint: orderEditAddVariant mutation
  • API Version: 2024-01
  • Documentation: [Redacted for security]

Issue Description: When adding a variant to an order through this endpoint, I’ve observed the following behavior:

  1. Normal case (expected):
  • When location parameter is null
  • System selects nearby fulfillment location
  • Tax calculations remain consistent
  1. Edge case (potential issue):
  • When specifying a specific location ID
  • Tax calculations appear to use the location’s physical address
  • This may result in incorrect tax jurisdiction application

Potential Impact: This could potentially allow incorrect tax collection based on fulfillment location rather than customer location. Customers can bypass paying the correct taxes and they are legally liable to pay the state the correct amount of taxes now because of the recalculation bug.

Is there any known way to force Avalara to freeze tax rates or recalculate tax rates based on a shipping address? Any known order tags etc I can add to the order to force this behaviour?

Keira