“If our partnership were a book, the title would be ‘It works!’”

Introduction

PangoBooks is an online marketplace dedicated to buying and selling books, built by a team passionate about creating a platform that serves both readers and independent sellers.

Industry

E-commerce, Marketplace

Location

USA

Website

pangobooks.com

Integration

TaxCloud API

Migrating from

Avalara

PangoBooks is a veteran-founded company powered by a dedicated team of customer support staff, engineers, and marketing specialists. The team comes from every region of the United States, with backgrounds ranging from bookselling and teaching to the armed forces and beyond.

What unites the team is a shared love of books and a commitment to making book buying more accessible and sustainable.

PangoBooks understands how special books are, which is why they built technology to empower readers to share the books they love. Unlike other secondhand marketplaces, PangoBooks is optimized specifically for books and readers. With their app, anyone can start the bookstore of their dreams today.

Download on the appstore
Get it on Google Play

Grant Singleton, the CTO and co-founder, helped create PangoBooks with a focus on offering a seamless experience for users, allowing them to explore, discover, and share their love for books. As a rapidly growing company selling across all 50 states, managing sales tax compliance was a complex and time-consuming task.

Challenge

Before implementing TaxCloud, PangoBooks faced significant challenges in managing sales tax compliance, especially with multi-state transactions. They had previously been using Avalara’s Avatax service, but according to Grant, the experience left much to be desired. The cost of Avalara was high, and their customer support was inconsistent, often taking days to respond. Additionally, Avalara’s interface felt overly complex for PangoBooks’ needs.

Grant summarized the challenge:

“We were moving away from Avalara mainly because of the pricing, but also due to bad customer service. When we switched to TaxCloud, I expected a lesser product based on the pricing difference. But the TaxCloud solution was the same — if not simpler — compared to Avatax.”

Solution

TaxCloud proved to be the right fit for PangoBooks, particularly in handling the complexities of multi-state sales tax. The simplicity of TaxCloud’s user interface and its pricing model were standout features for Grant.

“TaxCloud does exactly what we need it to do — sales tax collection for an online marketplace — and it works perfectly,” said Grant.

The straightforward dashboard allowed PangoBooks to quickly track taxes collected and monitor state-by-state requirements.

One of the key benefits was the ease with which they could manage compliance across all 50 states.

Grant explained, “You just turn on a state, and it immediately starts recording transactions. TaxCloud’s onboarding team was really helpful in getting everything set up, but even without that, it’s easy to navigate.”

Results

Since moving to TaxCloud, PangoBooks has seen a significant improvement in the efficiency of its tax management processes. The simplicity of TaxCloud’s platform allowed Grant’s team to integrate it quickly and focus on growing their marketplace, rather than worrying about infrastructure or constant system maintenance.

“As a CTO, it’s a relief. You don’t want to spend your time fighting with tax software,” Grant stated.

Additionally, PangoBooks was able to cut costs dramatically. The company saved tens of thousands of dollars by switching from Avalara to TaxCloud.

“We paid around $25 to $30k for TaxCloud, compared to $100 to $150k with Avalara. The pricing difference is huge, and it’s a relief to move away from the endless negotiations just to get a decent price.”

Final thoughts

When asked what the title of a book about the PangoBooks-TaxCloud partnership would be, Grant responded simply: “It works!” For a CTO with a growing company, that’s high praise.

“Things are always breaking in tech, but TaxCloud just works. It’s easy to set up, easy to manage, and it doesn’t require constant oversight. That’s exactly what we need.”