About this guide

About this guide

Welcome to the Shipping and Age Verification for Beverage Alcohol API Guide! This document describes how technology partners and developers can use the Shipping verification endpoints to verify that transactions for alcoholic beverages are compliant with all alcohol shipping laws defined for the jurisdiction(s) they are shipping to and to register those transactions. It also describes how to use the Age verification endpoints to verify that purchasers or recipients of alcoholic beverage transactions are within the legal age limit for the jurisdiction(s) where you are shipping to

Requirements

  • Shipping Verification Requirements:
    • Your AvaTax account must have Beverage Alcohol enabled in order to use these APIs.
    • Your Beverage Alcohol licenses must exist in eCompli. You can work with your Beverage Alcohol account manager to set up licenses in eCompli.
    • A saved SalesInvoice or ReturnInvoice transaction must already exist in AvaTax in order use the shipping verification endpoints.
  • Age Verification Requirements:
    • Your AvaTax account must have an active AgeVerification subscription.

Assumptions

This document assumes that you have experience using the AvaTax REST v2 APIs. If you don't have experience with the AvaTax REST v2 APIs, we recommend that you review the following developer documentation resources to become familiar with these APIs:

Important:

  • Currently, compliance checks are only performed for the alcoholic beverage tax codes listed below. All other tax codes are unsupported and are assumed to be compliant.
    • PA2020100: Packaged alcohol - spirits
    • PA2020300: Packaged alcohol - wine
    • PA2020301: Packaged alcohol - sparkling wine
    • PA2020302: Packaged alcohol - fortified wine
    • PA2020400: Packaged alcohol - hard cider and other flavored beverages
    • PA2020500: Packaged alcohol - mixed alcoholic beverages
    Checks for additional alcoholic beverage tax codes will be available in future releases.
  • These APIs can only be used with the DTC (direct-to-consumer) and Retailer DTC alcohol route types. Support for additional route types will be available in a future release.

Limitations:

  • The AvaTax SDKs cannot be used for shipping or age verification. 
  • These shipping verification APIs are only supported for transactions shipping to and from locations in the US.
  • For intrastate transactions, the shipping verification APIs currently apply interstate rules.