Stripe to acquire TaxJar to help online merchants with sales taxes

Stripe on Tuesday said it’s acquiring TaxJar, a provider of sales tax software for internet businesses. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Launched in 2013, TaxJar now has more than 23,000 customers, including major businesses like Microsoft and Coca-Cola. Nearly every US state now collects sales taxes from online merchants. Adding local online sales taxes into the mix, there are more than 11,000 different sales tax jurisdictions in the US alone, Stripe said. 

“For internet businesses, accurately tracking, calculating, reporting, and filing taxes is a large and growing burden,” Stripe noted in its release. “Indeed, one of the top requests from Stripe’s users over the past five years has been for assistance in navigating sales tax.”

Stripe said it plans to make TaxJar a pillar of its “revenue platform,” which also includes Stripe Billing for subscription management, as well as Stripe Radar for fraud and risk management. Adding TaxJar to the platform will custom Stripe customers automate tasks like providing accurate sales tax rates at checkout (tied to the exact street address of the customer) and producing compliance reports for state and local jurisdictions. 

For now, existing TaxJar users won’t see any changes to the company’s products. As part of the acquisition, TaxJar’s 200 employees will be joining Stripe. 

Following the acquisition, Stripe said it will keep expanding the tools it offers to help internet businesses with sales tax. Specifically, the company is planning a suite of tax tools that other platforms can offer their own customers.