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Sporting Goods Retailer Manages Products, Billing and Sales Tax With Celerant
Geiger’s Sporting Goods and Apparel Story
Our store was founded in 1932, by our grandfather and grandmother back after the Depression years. I’m a third generation co-owner of Giger’s clothing and sports in Lakewood, Ohio. These are brick-and-mortar stores that we’ve been doing outdoor wear, menswear, womenswear, footwear, and some sporting goods or over 80 years now.
Celerant Technology in Sporting Goods Industry
Our prior retail software really wasn’t doing it for us and Celerant really boosted our ability to analyze our purchases to analyze our sell-through. It was an integrated program that took us from general ledger, written down to point-of-sale activity, so it was a very smooth transition. And while we had other choices, we found that Celerant really met our needs as a part of our business.
We sell team sporting goods team outfitting to local groups charities schools and the Celerant software has allowed us to invoice in a way that pulls together all of the costs that are involved. With putting together those large orders, it also allows us to individually bill parents and groups, and really tracks the whole process from selection of the merchandise right on through the selling and billing of our customers.
Celerant’s Evolving Solutions
The reason why we’re successful, for now 87 years, is that we continue to listen and we’ve evolved and part of our greatest evolution was Celerant. We knew that they were on the forefront of eCommerce even though we weren’t with it at the time. The value of having the inventory be all connected between all our stores and line is huge. Celerant is the best when it comes to having that capability.
Celerant and Avalara Sales Tax Integration
When Giger’s got into eCommerce, we recognized that we needed to collect and remit sales tax. We were fortunate that Celerant had this partnership with Avalara. Avalara can calculate the tax for any locale to where we’re shipping, helping us to analyze those tax dollars and get them remitted to the proper locale. It’s different in every state. It’s unique in the state of Ohio, the different counties and different municipalities have different sales tax rates, so you can see how it could be very complicated and be stressful on a business that hopes to make it easy to make sales over the web. The Avalara and Celerant connection was easy. It was seamless for us, it is a set-and-forget type of product.
Ready for Future Innovation with Celerant
We don’t have to worry about is it working. What we have to worry about is what products that we have for our customers. The service that we provide our customers, that’s what we do and that’s what we do best. Having that partnership with Celerant and with Avalara, we know that we are ready to face the challenges and the changing environment of being a successful retailer in our local communities and on the web. Before we were always thinking you know, mom-and-pop shop can’t compete now we have customers all over the country.
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