Retailers face myriad disruptions every day. But as we become increasingly reliant on technology, one concern looms especially large: outages.
The threat is real. Trusted retailers across large swaths of America experienced windows of lost connectivity during the 2021 holiday season, grabbing headlines, frustrating customers and putting transaction tracking in peril (if not momentarily cutting those sales off altogether).
The threat of getting knocked offline makes having reliable tax technology all the more critical, as retailers start to question whether the cloud is the most reliable place to be. The good news is that new technologies and advances in edge computing are creating options for retailers large and small.
“I’ve been doing this work a long time, and when we talk about tax automation, the retailer has frankly been somewhat ignored by the technology,” said Eric Christian, Principal Architect of Innovation for Vertex, a global provider of tax technology solutions.
But that’s changing. In January 2022, Vertex unveiled its Vertex® Indirect Tax O Series® Edge cloud solution. This enables global omnichannel retailers to configure, automate and deploy containerized tax engines where transactions are being processed, delivering enhanced performance and scalability for tax automation at the point of need.
Retailers have traditionally dealt with a process that has been inefficient and prone to error.
“Tax engines have historically been centralized or cloud-based solutions, so retailers would have to take that transaction and send a request over the internet to get a response,” Christian said. “That’s problematic, because what happens if the network goes down?”
Vertex O Series Edge leverages the latest edge computing technology to manage tax calculation at the point of transaction for the highest availability, improved control over performance and a streamlined tax technology landscape. It is an end-to-end solution that enables the calculation of tax locally, in store or in an e-commerce data center to maximize performance while transactions are aggregated centrally for reporting and compliance.
“What we’re doing with edge is we’re enabling retailers to have a full-fledged tax engine right there in the store or right there in the point of sale (POS) terminal,” Christian said. “They get the full features and all the current rates and rules, enabling them to calculate tax correctly, without having to go to the internet.”
To read full download the whitepaper:
Reliability starts at the edge: How optimizing tax technology can improve customer experience and remove frustrations
