Sales Tax for Global Creators
A native sales tax compliance solution for Kajabi merchants selling digital goods globally, covering tax calculation at checkout, compliant receipts, and merchant-facing reporting across US and international jurisdictions.
The Problem
Kajabi merchants selling digital goods had no reliable way to calculate or collect sales tax through the platform. Tax obligations vary significantly across US states and international jurisdictions, and without native support, merchants were left to manage compliance on their own.
Why It Mattered
The problem mapped directly to three of Kajabi's core payments KPIs: reducing churn, increasing Kajabi Payments adoption, and growing merchant GMV. Sales tax friction appeared repeatedly in exit surveys, blocked merchants from activating Kajabi Payments, and drove off-platform sales that took GMV off Kajabi's payment rails.
The Solution
A native end-to-end tax compliance experience built into the Kajabi checkout flow, covering sales tax calculation at checkout, tax-compliant receipts globally, and merchant-facing tax reporting. Rather than building tax calculation in-house from scratch, I led a build versus buy evaluation across several vendors, ultimately pairing Kajabi's own compliance framework with a vendor for calculation assistance.
Order summary
Online Business Course
Instant digital access
Customer location
California, United States
Secured by Kajabi Payments
🇺🇸 United States
Sales Tax · 8.75%
Under the Hood
My Role
I led this initiative end-to-end, from identifying the problem through merchant research and exit data, to owning the vendor evaluation, scoping the build, and driving launch, coordinating across 7 cross-functional teams. The project spanned 12 weeks: 4 weeks of discovery, vendor selection, and planning followed by an 8-week build and launch sprint.
Impact
Sales tax became one of the strongest retention and adoption levers in the Kajabi Payments portfolio.
7–10%
Monthly increase in Kajabi Payments activation
2.2×
Longer retention for merchants using tax vs. those without
~10%
GMV lift for tax-enabled merchants (net of collected tax)
Learnings
The sales tax education curve is high, and a lot of emphasis is required to educate merchants.
Tax compliance is never done. With evolving rules, you have to constantly adapt your solution.
Flexibility has a complexity cost: the non-Merchant of Record approach gave large merchants control but added friction for smaller merchants who just wanted it to work.