Townchest, Mirakl, Avalara: How a Marketplace Actually Works Behind the Scenes

Rick Watson talks with Alan Gaffney (CEO, Townchest), Nick Boetcher (Avalara), and Justin Samakow (Mirakl) about what breaks when a marketplace scales.Townchest runs a "shopping for good" program where schools partner with manufacturers to fund themselves through retail sales. A regional launch created nationwide Nexus exposure within weeks, because supporters of a school in Ohio live in Texas, California, and everywhere else. Alan unpacks the hybrid seller-of-record setup that followed: Townchest carries that role for some partners, not others, and the operational cost runs both ways.Justin and Nick cover the back-end. Mirakl's Catalog Transformer normalizes supplier data and pushes it into thousands of school storefronts. Avalara's Avi agent assigns tax codes from a global library against the data Mirakl sends through. The two also get into where strict SLA automation earns its keep (auto-deactivating sellers who miss order acceptance) versus where alerts suffice (high return rates).The Private Storefronts, Shared Suppliers, One Compliance Nightmare webinar was sponsored by Avalara and Mirakl.