The Journey from Database Developer to Project Manager

Marcus: Well, hey everyone. I’m Marcus Burnett, and it’s been a minute, but I’m glad to be back in the host seat here, and I’m excited to welcome a guest today. We have Prashant Rana from Avalara joining me, and we’re going to get a chance to know a little bit about him. Prashant, how are you doing today?

Prashant: Doing good, Marcus. How about you?

Marcus: Not too bad. Not too bad.

The road to product manager

We’re just going to dive right on in, and I’m going to just see if I can get you to tell us a little bit about yourself. Can you share a little bit about your background, and how you came to work as a product manager at Avalara?

Prashant: I’m been a senior product manager at Avalara right now, and I’ve been working in the tech field for over 12 years. Did quite a few roles. Started off as a developer and incidentally, I was a PhD developer when I started my first foray to product. So I started off as a database developer, but that got boring very quickly, just writing SQL queries day by day. And then hey, there’s this thing that we can do this packaging and build lightweight end-to-end pieces of software that we can package and sell. So okay, that sounds interesting. And that brought me into the PHP world. And then that was I think my leap into product because then I saw the end-to-end building and I said, “Okay, hey, I want to go into the other areas as well.” And that brought me into product. Have been working in product management for a while now across several companies.And the latest one is Avalara where I’m having fun in the tax world. I never thought I would say this ever, but I am saying that now.

So that’s my story. And I’m excited to be here today to be discuss Avalara’s integrations with WooCommerce, WordPress. That’s the area I work in in the integration space with several of our partners. So I’m glad to be here and thanks for having me.

Marcus: Absolutely. In stalking your LinkedIn profile just a little bit, I took a peek at some of the companies that you worked for and your degrees, and I saw you have a degree in computer engineering and an BA. How have these shaped how you think about the products at Avalara?

Prashant: So both of them have been invaluable. So having the computer engineering degree has kept me sharp technically, even though I have over time have let the smarter folks in development take over. But to be able to make sense of what they say, it always helps to always lean back to the basics and keep myself updated. So it helps to keep the conversation flowing. And of course, the MBA has been helpful in being able to converse with so many of our partners and also understand the tax world a little better because you learn about all these things during the MBA, how these financial implications come up and you do realize, yes, so many companies have been pulled up for financial audits. So you do realize the impact any financial app or any assistant app to help you comply with your financial needs is, how important that is. So I think Avalara stands at the intersection of both of them, and that’s where studying both of these courses actually has helped me so far.

The path to working in tax compliance and WooCommerce

Marcus: Yeah, that totally makes sense from a tax compliance company. To have that MBA I think would be invaluable to just keep an eye on all of that. And love that coming from the computer engineering side that you’re able to have those conversations with the engineers still. Looping back to Avalara and joining there, what initially attracted you to the e-commerce and tax compliance space, particularly in relation to WooCommerce?

Prashant: Basically, I would say a little bit the pandemic because I just saw the way the trends were going on and the way e-commerce boomed. It has had its good times and bad times, but it was a philosophy I had already bought into. Even prior to the pandemic, I was seeing the headwinds that were going around with that. These were part of our discussions even at school with my peers and seeing the way e-commerce was going to start taking over. And it does not to… We don’t need to be locked in to really take the benefits of e-commerce. And WooCommerce being one of the largest platforms on which e-commerce is enabled and in a open source world, so you have your own freedom around it. So it’s again, the best of both worlds.

And going back to my development days, I could see the flexibility that a WordPress app could give you. I dabbled with WordPress, MediaWiki at that point. And the ability to quickly turn around something, experiment, and get back to what you really want to build along with feedback, that’s what amazed me with WooCommerce. And then you do realize that you have to, even if you start selling, that taxation is a big, big deal in that. And like I said, I never thought that taxes would be interesting, but then you start to see the kind of complexity that comes up. And during the interview process and when I was talking with folks, it was like, “Oh, this is the level of complexity you have to keep in mind.” And that’s what I was like, “Okay, this is a challenge that I want to be a part of.”

Avalara supporting WooCommerce

Marcus: And that’s totally makes sense with the pandemic. That’s not how I got involved with WooCommerce, but definitely how I joined a WooCommerce-specific company as well was right at the beginning of the pandemic. And so it just exploded and people needed help. People needed folks to come on board and help with that, what my former manager coined a catastrophic success. It was an interesting time for sure. We’ve touched on it just a little bit, danced around it some. We’ve mentioned tax compliance and stuff, but why don’t you maybe give our listeners a little bit of an overview of what Avalara does and how it supports WooCommerce users?

Prashant: So Avalara has been partnering with WooCommerce since around 2015 to provide the sales tax capabilities. So it is available as a WooCommerce tax extension, which is powered by Avalara. It helps deliver quick and accurate sales tax calculation reporting and the sales tax filing for businesses. And that’s primarily because anyone who wants to sell, the focus should be on selling and expanding and being able to grow their business, rather than getting caught in this myriad of complex and overlapping tax rules. So that’s where Avalara comes in as a handy plugin that you can use, and that’s what Avalara has been striving for. And with WooCommerce especially because again, it’s a WordPress-based and it’s in the open source world, it has been built with developer focus in mind.

So basically developers, when they’re trying to build things, they have to focus on the user experience. This is one of the things that they have to do. So they can actually now start to focus more on their clients without having to worry about intricacies and suddenly your client coming up or your merchant coming up and saying, “Hey, by the way, I’m thinking of selling to that specific… I got an order from that specific area in Denver, Colorado, and I think there are multiple taxes here. Can you find it out?” You can use Avalara for that. And I was blown off by when I came in and I was like, “Okay, you just do this, this, and that’s it. Okay, so the rest of the calculation is taken care in the back engine.” So as a tech person myself, I was blown off. So I’m pretty much sure that many of my developer brethren will also feel the same at some point.

Building and improving products for the WooCommerce community

Marcus: For sure. More specifically to you, how do you approach building and improving products at Avalara that cater to the WooCommerce community?

Prashant: With all of our partnerships, we start with our focus on the partner-first mentality, and essentially, that translates into customer first. So we think about the kind of person who would be interacting with these plugins or integrations in the first place. So that’s the way we at Avalara think, and it’s also been a personal philosophy for me, in WooCommerce especially because the first set of eyes that we get on are the developers. Yes, the merchants think about it. They know that they have to be tax compliant, but also the developers who enable this platform for the merchants. They are the first set of eyes on this. So that’s how we approach this to try and make it as easy to configure, easy to understand, and also easy to extend.

So being a developer, when I would pick out extensions for my platforms, I would totally concentrate on how easy it was to a install. Would it confirm to all the prerequisites, all the general tech stack that is being used around at that point of time, and it is taking care of all the potential upgrades that are coming in the tech stack. And then also see can I extend this? Can I make this more customizable? If someone comes to me and says, “Hey, I want to alter the flow a little bit,” can I do that? And with WooCommerce, we also provide developers with a lot of handy hooks that allow them to customize, and we are always open to suggestions, requests, and if folks go onto the WooCommerce extensions page and find Avalara, you can also submit a request asking for a different hook if you need it once you define the business case for us. So we are very flexible that way to support developers to bring out the best in WooCommerce without really worrying about the taxes behind.

Marcus: That’s awesome, catering to both the store owners and developers.

Thanks to our Pod Friend Hostinger

The challenges for your clients with tax compliance

You shared a little bit already about just how really simple it is to get tax compliance set up on a WooCommerce store. I’m curious though, maybe even beyond that, what do you think are some of the most pressing challenges for store owners when it comes to tax compliance and anything in the tax compliance realm?

Prashant: So not only store owners, I would say everyone. It’s tax season, hey, so even filing personal taxes can get so complicated very quickly. But again, I was blown away by seeing the complexity that comes in so quickly. States like Colorado for example, and Louisiana, the other states having different types of sales tax but exempt from local tax and being able to handle all this different businesses that come in, and especially for e-commerce because yes, it’s easy to start an e-commerce business. I guess the way I see it is the maintenance and long-term sustain, which is the challenge to be compliant with so many things as you start expanding. So hey, who does not want to expand their business? But to do that within the regulations, the compliance framework, it is a challenge out there and especially on something which is so well defined but complex as sales tax.

I’ll just give you an example what. Sales tax holidays for example, which some of them have overlapping timeframes and different exemptions at different points of time. So one thing Florida for example has tax-free periods for baby and toddler clothing from 1 July 2022 to June 30th, 2023. And there is a back to school tax holiday from July 25 through August 25, 2022. Now both of these areas overlap. So keeping track of these happening and especially with the… And the pandemic has also been one of the features because many of the states declared tax holidays, lowered tax rates to help people throughout depending on the demographics of the specific state who needed assistance. So keeping track of all this was always challenging and you can see these are overlapping time periods, it becomes complicated there. So that is one example that comes to my mind out there.

And also the other challenges that I feel is especially returns. So yes, everyone bought into the e-commerce boom, but then you see a lot of buyer regret come up, as you might have seen in a lot of analyst reports and a lot of industry reports. You have the holiday season for buying, and then you have the return season running through January into February, and you see a lot of returns coming in, a lot of buyer remorse, a lot of, I would say stuff that people realized that, “Hey, this is not exactly what I wanted.” Or some people were just buying impulsively. And that has also affected consumer patterns in choosing what to buy.

I was reading the other day that there’s a survey which says that 40% of the consumers are held back from buying online due to the frustration of the return policies, and more than 60% are actually looking at the return policies before choosing to buy on an e-commerce store. So for e-commerce vendors now, this has become a point where they have to ensure that their returns are hassle-free and easy because that gives confidence. Even though if people don’t utilize it. Just having that assurance that, “Hey, I’ll get my money back without any complications,” and it’s a frustration-free return is going to be an important part going forward.

Avalara publishes this blog called “Wacky Tax Wednesdays.” Pretty interesting, pretty funny instances as well, but it’s funny when you read it. I really feel it’s not funny for the people who actually go through that. So one of the recent examples was somewhere in Virginia where the retailer was shipping prepaid labels for returns, but actually they didn’t tax the return fees as part of the transaction and the Virginia Department of taxation actually treated this charge as taxable restocking fees once the stuff came back. The retailer had to file multiple appeals. After two appeals, finally the state audit was like, “This is the first time or this is a new thing, so we let you go.” But hey, not all auditors are that generous overall. So in summary, the way I would put it is navigating sales laws and regulation itself can be daunting, and add to this complexity of returns and tax holidays and exemptions, it can get complicated very quickly.

Marcus: The buyer’s remorse aspect of it totally makes sense. When you’re buying things online, you aren’t necessarily sure exactly what you’re going to get. And so having that out, being able to return something if it’s not what you expected it to be, it totally makes sense. But it’s very interesting to me. I didn’t realize that there were tax implications on the returns as well.

Prashant: Yes. And we are starting to see trends around it, and that’s what Avalara does best. We get to see this from many of our partners, so many of our customers, and millions of transactions that come in and then we end up codifying that and bringing it in as updates so that folks really don’t have to worry about that.

What sets Avalara apart from other tax compliance solutions

Marcus: I know that Avalara does more than just tax compliance for e-commerce stores. I know that’s a slice of what Avalara does. Keeping that in mind and even the tax compliance part and e-commerce stores, what do you think sets Avalara apart from other tax compliance solutions that are available for WooCommerce?

Prashant: I feel the complianceness of the in data that is available is what sets sets Avalara apart from many of the tax providers and the regular updates that are there. Also, we are finding better and better ways of delivering all these updates from time to time. We are automating a lot of these processes. So going forward, the way we see is bringing in a lot more automation and a lot more… Reporting itself is available, but now things like getting insights out of it is going to be essential going forward.

In addition, like you said, sales tax is one of the things Avalara is in the compliance-based technique. So it is not only sales tax but then other areas of compliance such as exemptions so exemption certificate management, you can think about business licenses. Hey, you need to register in another state. You can use business licenses for that. Returns, as you expand your business, you are liable for tax collection and reporting of that in different states, so the entire suite. And as we see WooCommerce holding such a hold on the e-commerce space, you essentially understand that all these services are going to be needed by businesses as they scale and grow. And Avalara is there with them for the journey. So that one tax account for them can do much more than just sales tax calculation.

Marcus: So often when Avalara and WooCommerce are in the same sentence or you see Avalara’s sponsoring Do The Woo or other things within the space, so much of that is just people connect that with tax compliance and collecting sales tax at the WooCommerce store. But wanted to make sure that everyone understood that Avalara does so much more than just collecting sales tax at a WooCommerce store. So appreciate you sharing some of the additional pieces there as well.

Staying on top of the never-ending changes in tax compliance

Along the lines of what you’ve been talking about, and you’ve already shared a little bit about automating processes too, but how do you all stay up to date with the constantly changing tax regulations to ensure that Avalara solutions remain current?

Prashant: We have automation there too, and also upon a lot of really, really smart people, and tax experts, and subject matter experts who are looking through with all this information. I would like to plug in one more product that Avalara acquired a couple of years ago, Avalara Tax Research, which is also comprehensive source of all tax information keep that is regularly updated for all the changes that happens. So if you get access to that, you can even go down to see each regulation or hey, that amendment came up in that state senate, and that’s a new regulation that was passed. And those differences and updates are published every week, every month through that channel as well. So now we have the combined power of the engine and also having it in verbiage form if someone is curious to know about that. So you can see the comprehensiveness of all the information that is now available. We keep a constant tab on that, and our tax engine is updated regularly with those updates coming in.

Marcus: There’s a lot to keep track of there, and I find it so interesting that you can even dig down into the reporting and stuff to see where different senate regulations and all of that come into play. That’s mind boggling to me to be honest.

Prashant: Oh you have been in this space. I would consider myself newer, but it is mind boggling to me as well. Hey, I work with documents in my job and even going through that, I really appreciate the folks who actually go through this, make sense of it, see how it is relevant to each of our different categories of products that we have, and what are the implications that it’s going to have, and help us ensure that we are able to provide this as part of our integrations, and by extension, to partners like WooCommerce. So it’s a lot of effort, but that’s what we are here for.

The future of tax compliance in the eCommerce space

Marcus: For sure. Before we wrap up, I want to loop back to you and specifically your senior product management role. Looking ahead, what do you envision for the future of tax compliance in the e-commerce space, and how do you see Avalara stepping in to help specifically WooCommerce store owners, but just e-commerce in general with what’s coming down the line?

Prashant: So with e-commerce, we are seeing all the trends, and we are trying to be abreast of that. Like we said, things like returns are starting to come in the forefront. Similarly, checkout processes are getting a little bit more simple on the front end but complicated on the back end, especially things like buy now, pay later coming into the picture where you are having multiple payments that will go through and you have to split taxes across all of them. You have to know how to disperse all that. And then that goes into your reporting, that goes into your filing. So those kind of things are going to come up as challenges and mix both of them. So somebody bought it on buy now, pay later, paid two installments, and by that time, returned it back again. So you can see the complexity that can quickly come up there. So those are the kind of things that we are keeping an eye out for as we go through.

Automation will be a big picture. Again, we are quite automated already, so most of our regulations allow for just plug in play and rest assured kind of thing. But again, we are actively seeking feedback from our partners. Partners like WooCommerce are valuable to us and their feedback, and also, like I said, the developer community. So say they’re coming back to us with these hooks that we need. That’s what we want to build in. So that’s how we actually actually ended up building and we are providing more and more customizable features so that you can do all those kind of things, like for example, filtering which reports need to go into AvaTax for example. That is something that we brought in, and you can code it rather than being tied to a pre-built extension. So both these aspects are being looked towards, and we see those trends across the board.

The other area that I’m seeing is headless commerce, which is coming up a lot. And because everyone wants to customize their experience, have a control on their tech stack, their tech spend overall. So supporting those kind of partnerships is also going to be essential as we go forward. So those are the basic things that I’m able to see.

Marcus: That’s awesome. Well, Prashant, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on. You are doing great stuff in a space that is super complex and super complicated, but Avalara makes it easy for the end users. And so thank you so much for coming on, and sharing all of that, and keep up the good work.

Prashant: Yeah, it’s been great being part of this podcast and discussing Avalara’s continued commitment to this growing partnership with WooCommerce. And before we go, I just wanted to put a plugin for the WooCommerce folks. So if you’re attending WordCamp in Europe, in Athens, Greece later this June, so please make sure to stop by the Avalara booth. We’ll all be in bright orange, very difficult to miss. And also, if you’re part of the WooCommerce WooExpert program, be on the lookout for more information and updates coming from Avalara your way very soon. Like I said, we love to support our developer ecosystem. So thank you for having me here, Marcus. This has been a pleasure.

Marcus: Absolutely. And I should be in Greece as well, so I look forward to seeing you in person.

Prashant: Likewise.

Marcus: Thanks so much.

Prashant: All right, thank you.