Sales tax and VAT software for BigCommerce

No, and it does not remit either. What BigCommerce sends is order data, and its own setting is worded as submitting that data so you can use your provider's reporting and returns features. Filing is a separate product you add inside your Avalara account, listed alongside Cross-Border. Submission timing is a choice between order creation and payment capture, and BigCommerce warns that orders paid by an offline method get no tax documents submitted at all. Nothing in BigCommerce pays a tax authority. Commenda files across all 50 states on each state's required frequency and across 70+ countries, tracks remittance per jurisdiction, and files amended returns where a period needs correcting.

No. Automatic tax means installing a third-party provider app and connecting your own account with that provider. BigCommerce names Avalara, Vertex, TaxJar, and TaxCloud, and only one may be enabled on a store at any one time. Its own answer on cost is that you subscribe to AvaTax at a fixed rate tied to your store's plan, with Enterprise merchants told to contact Avalara directly. Everywhere the provider is not targeted, calculation falls back to basic tax, which is a rate table you maintain by hand. Commenda covers calculation, registration, filing, and remittance from one place, and connecting BigCommerce takes no engineering work.

No. Nexus is not something BigCommerce measures. Its guidance is that if you have nexus in multiple states or local jurisdictions, the additional jurisdictions are adjusted from within your tax provider's account, so registration is an input you supply rather than an obligation it finds. Under basic tax the picture is starker: a zone charges tax only where you built it, and the default zone applies 0% to every region you did not set up. Commenda measures the same BigCommerce orders against economic and physical thresholds in all 50 states, every EU member state, and 70+ countries, and notifies you at 80% of a registration threshold, before you cross.

It is not. BigCommerce is your storefront, so a direct sale is yours to tax, file, and remit. Marketplace sales are different. Under marketplace facilitator rules the marketplace generally collects and remits on the sales it facilitates, and your direct sales stay your responsibility. BigCommerce connects to Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Meta through Channel Manager apps, and it states that with automatic tax enabled it does not calculate tax on orders created via the API. So already-taxed marketplace revenue lands in your BigCommerce data untouched by tax logic on either side. Commenda separates facilitated from direct sales and tracks the tax the marketplace already collected, so a direct order gets tax applied and an already-taxed one does not.

It depends on the state, and BigCommerce leaves the mapping to you. Its tax settings hold a Shipping tax class, a Handling tax class, and a Gift Wrapping tax class, and the Handling field defaults to the Shipping class rather than one of its own. The Fees field is not currently active. Under basic tax you then set a rate for each of those classes in every zone, which means keeping up with the states that tax delivery charges and the states that do not. Commenda keeps shipping and handling revenue separate from item revenue on every transaction and applies each state's rule to it, so the split does not depend on a field you remembered to change.

Differently from everything else in the order, and the rule is fixed. BigCommerce states that digital products are always taxed based on the order's billing address, regardless of the address type you selected in your tax settings. So a store calculating on the destination address still taxes its downloads on billing. Under basic tax you would also need a tax class and a rate per zone for them. Commenda's product catalogue covers tangible personal property, digital goods, SaaS, professional services, and industry-specific categories, and resolves the correct treatment per state for each, including EU VAT on digital sales through OSS.

Not unless you want us to. The common shape is that most revenue arrives from the storefront with tax already applied, and a smaller share originates somewhere else and still needs calculating. Calculation is applied selectively, so already-taxed ecommerce orders stay untouched while direct orders get tax applied. Every transaction carries the system it came from, which is what stops the two being counted twice. This is a real risk rather than a theoretical one, and BigCommerce flags a version of it itself: if your tax provider account is also connected to an ERP, its own advice is to switch order data submission off to prevent duplicate reporting of your tax liabilities.