Tariffs, Taxes & Cross-Border Growth: Avalara’s George Trantas on What Retailers Must Know in 2025

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Ann Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from Shop Talk at the avalara booth, booth 1554.

We're gonna be here all day interviewing the best and the brightest retail executives.

That's what I'm trying to say, Anne.

The best and the brightest retail executives out there.

And right now we have Avalara Senior director of Global Marketplaces, George Trantis.

George, congrats on your first day of Shop Talk and welcome back to omnitalk.

Thank you.

I'm so excited.

When I had this opportunity, I'm like, this is a no brainer.

I want to be here.

I love that we are congratulating him on his first day of Shop Talk.

Already, like, you survived six hours.

You heard what George had to do to get here.

And oh my God, he had to.

Your son.

Let's give your son a shout out.

So Anthony Tarantis won the tier three national championship in hockey yesterday.

So go Junior Hurricanes.

Oh my gosh, that's so exciting.

For people who are hockey fans like me, to win something like that is such a major accomplishment.

So congrats.

Thank you.

As a goalie, dad, it's a lot of stress.

60 minutes.

Yeah.

You had to reorganize his flights throughout the entire day.

Got here on like a late, late flight.

So thanks for being here though, George.

Well, George, let's get back to the task at hand here.

Tell us a little bit about what you do and what Avalara does.

Yeah, so I've got a couple roles right now, so I lead the Global Marketplace team.

So five years ago, we built this marketplace strategy to really one, make sure we had the right people in place.

So when you're talking about marketplace, you're talking millions of items, unknown quantities typically built on their own infrastructure.

And so we just really built a team that specializes in E commerce and understanding what marketplaces need.

And then more recently, I've taken over a couple other teams.

I've got Cross Border and logistics.

I've got our property tax, our license management, and our 1099 offering.

And so, you know, what's that?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, with Cross Border and truck, right.

Now we've got a lot going on.

What are you talking about?

There's nothing going on there.

I don't even know why you need that role specifically.

And obviously Avalara is a leader in tax compliance and we have license management.

Excuse me, E.L.R.

so, Ian voices in live reporting coming up as well.

So that's been a big push for the last 18 months and growing massively right now.

Right.

So George, I want to get to tariffs and trade and all that but I want to go into the cross border commerce angle a little bit too with you.

So, so what is your take on cross border commerce in general?

Like is it a big opportunity for retailers?

Are retailers looking at it the right way?

What are your thoughts?

I think it's double sided right now.

So you've got, with the tariffs coming in, you got the import side so you're going to have this retail like sort of knock on effect.

You know you priced an item with a retail tag 12 to 18 months ago.

That's going to create a huge disruption in cost and potentially revenue for some of these businesses.

But I think there's still this huge opportunity for E commerce expansion.

You know we, it was what Bric, you know, BRIC countries seven, ten years ago.

We still talk about BRIC countries, they're just not.

We can't ship to Russia, India.

E commerce is sort of slowed down in my opinion but really it's Canada, Mexico.

How are you doing those things?

Well, uk, English speaking countries, if you're not taking advantage of those wallets you're really missing out.

And there's a large percentage of the retailers that aren't currently right if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, I think a lot of people say they do it and then you go to their website and it's almost an afterthought.

So it's really done at best poorly.

And so the customer experience in the US is great.

And then you go to, if you're in Ireland or the uk it's like oh maybe I can get it here.

I don't know how long it's going to take, what it's going to cost.

So if you're really not doing a ddp, a full landed cost model, you're probably having a customer experience problem.

And I'm sure this is a much more complicated and in depth question that someone could call you and go into more detail on.

But just like top level George, how do you think retailers can be successful with their cross border commerce?

You gave us a couple of ideas but like where do you start and how do you prepare for this especially when it's changing so frequently.

Yeah, I always start with where do your customers come from today?

So why reinvent the wheel?

So if you have a lot of Canadian customers coming in, start with Canada.

Don't try to solve 200 countries at one time.

That's the Number one problem we see, one, you have language issues, two, you have pricing issues and payment issues.

So Canada's super easy.

99% of all credit cards work in Canada.

No problem.

Start with Canada and the uk, Australia.

And then the other thing you see that people tend to miss is they have a great product, a great price, they forget the shipping, they haven't negotiated a rate with a carrier yet, and all of a sudden you now have this $50 shipping charge.

So you've got to really, I always tell people, if you're gonna launch cross border, do what the best did.

Follow the best.

Look at Amazon, look at ebay, look at these large customers and go, what did they do?

They built a network, they built a framework, and they just expanded across the globe then.

So there's a lot of new things you probably have to do.

But it sounds like there's a roadmap to do it the right way.

That's pretty straightforward.

Yeah.

And if you're an Avalara customer, it's built into the API.

So all you have to do is call us up and we can turn it on and automatically to your system.

Super simple.

Oh, wow.

All right, well, let's talk tariffs now.

I teased it before tariffs.

I mean, I don't know which way is up on the tariff thing.

I imagine you don't either necessarily.

Maybe you do, I don't know.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what would your advice be for retailers that are trying to navigate all this uncertainty?

Stay calm.

I think that's what we gotta keep.

Calm and carry on.

I think it's a perfect sign for this.

I think there's a lot of changes.

I think for us like this Wayfair moment as we're calling it, will be if the minimus is removed.

Okay.

So right now, as a direct to consumer, you have pretty much duty free under $800.

If you look at the Shein model.

If you look at all the Roth is a great example of this.

They now warehouse stuff in America.

But all these direct consumers were coming in relatively inexpensive, inexpensive shipping from China, delivered to the door in under six days.

I'm more concerned on the B2B side and the retailers that are importing large amounts of goods that are, like I said earlier, untagged or not tagged.

If you get a 50% duty on a hundred dollar item, your pricing is gonna be way off.

Right.

So that's gonna be a huge concern for me right now.

Right.

And how do you, and how do you get in front of that though, like, I mean like let's say that happens, like how, what should I be doing now to get in front of that?

Yeah, it's a great question.

So I think there's two things I always think about is one, how do you actually prepare for this as a standard?

So if you don't have a trade compliance team which a lot of mid sized companies don't have, you should be looking at how do you package your goods, how do you bring them in properly and then how do you set the price so you have some room to discount in essence.

So you may want to be over thinking about overpricing your goods by 25 to 30%.

Right.

You can always bring it down.

You cannot raise the price once it's tagged.

Right.

That is now the list price of that item and it's hard to move it.

All right, well George, I mentioned it earlier but please, please give your information so that people listening can have these conversations can really get your, you have so much expertise.

George is the best.

So please reach out to George to get help with this to solve some of these questions that you're struggling with right now.

How do they do that?

Yeah.

So obviously you can go, you can email me at George.

George.trantesavalar.com hit me on LinkedIn.

But we have a whole team so if for cross border right now We've got over 300 people, content engineers.

Wow.

You know we have engineering everywhere just solving this problem.

But that's really the first part is message me.

Obviously Avalara, I'll get you to the right people.

We've hired a bunch of people from different e commerce places that have done this their whole life.

So really proud of the cross border team right now and what they're doing.

That's really exciting.

Yeah, it's important to call out that you guys have been doing this for a very long time.

Cross border is, it's like AI like you've been using it for a long time.

You've been well versed in cross border for a while now.

Yeah, the people we have on staff have been doing this for 25 years.

So you know Craig Reed and his team have built this across Pitney Bowes, ebay, Canada Post.

So this is a long standing team we've had here doing cross border and.

A lot of great resources too.

Like I mean I know Ann and I, in advance of shop talk we were boning up on a lot of the good cross border commerce, what to do about tariffs, resources that you have.

I know you got a blog that you guys have stood up where you're talking about this every single day.

All the new developments, you've got a primer on how to think about cross border commerce.

Put all that in the show notes here too, once we get this recording live.

But yeah, it's lots and lots of good stuff.

Before we let you go, is there anything we didn't ask you about that you know is top of mind that you think also should be on retailers here at Shop Talks Radar screen.

I think the number one question, we're running a weekly blog series right now.

So it's a tariff Tuesday, 30 minutes.

Quick.

The number one question we're getting is how do you charge tax on a tariff?

And I think that's an interesting question.

Oh, wow.

It depends on if you're in the U.S.

it's not a tax on a tariff.

You actually are taxed at the total item price.

What you have, this is where.

But in Europe, it's a very different model.

So when people ask us questions like that, it's usually a sign that they have they should talk to us.

Yeah, your question is great, but we just need a little more information.

So if you've got this question, reach out to us.

We'll put the notes in there, we'll put the blog in there.

Join that group.

Because we had a thousand people today, this morning at 8:00am Vegas time that were asking questions and we're interacting.

I think the fact that I love the most is 2015 we had about 1,125 million imports.

Under de minimis we're going to have 1.5 billion.

Jesus.

So there's a lot going on in the space right now.

Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of people grasping in the dark too, like just trying to figure this out on their own.

So yes.

Get help folks.

All right, George, that was awesome.

Thank you for that.

Glad I asked that last question.

That was really good to hear that I had no idea.

I never thought about tax on tariffs.

That's crazy.

All right, well, we're going to be back here all day with more interviews with great retail executives.

Thanks to Avalara, our sponsor.

Come check them out and us out if you want to say hi.

We're at booth 1554 for the rest of the day.

And Anne, as always, be careful out there.