Well, that didn’t take long!
I bought an amplifier on ebay last week. No tax. It showed up and didn’t work. Got a refund.
Ordered a replacement yesterday. Hit with tax.
Was it from the same seller? It’s been possible to have to pay sales tax on eBay for a long time, I think, if you bought from someone who is taxed on sales to your state.
What it may do is give an unfair advantage to big online sellers like Amazon over small businesses. Hear me out.
This is unlikely to cause a large shift to local shopping. Online shopping is probably driven more by convenience than by sales tax avoidance.
States could have shifted to other, less regressive, taxes.
Local mom and pop businesses could have added online sales to their business model. In fact, many have done exactly that and managed to survive by doing so. That may now be prohibitive for them, while they will still have to compete with Amazon and other big online retailers.
Hopefully states will only tax large online sellers. If so, sales tax avoidance may actually occur, but between big and small online sellers, leveling the field somewhat.
We’ll have to see how this plays out.
It looks like there may already be solutions available.
I’d like to know what they charge to obtain 10,000 sales tax permits for me. According to several sates I checked, we need not only the state permit, but city and county permits too. They seem to be geared to Amazon but Amazon will not let us sell digital products.
Also, how many of those jurisdictions have a filing fee?
If brick and mortar stores were being harmed, it wasn’t the fault of the Supreme Court, it was the fault of their states who chose to impose this sort of tax on them.
For the last fifty years, the law has been that sales taxes can only be levied on those who had a physical presence in the state. Nonetheless, these states chose to impose that tax instead of seeking other methods of revenue.
Indeed, South Dakota was especially reliant on it because it chose not to have a state income tax, nor impose heavy taxes on oil and gas. Why, just because it made that choice, is there now an “emergency”?
I hate to break the bad news folks, but most states already require that you pay sales tax on out-of-state purchases (e.g. via the internet, by mail-order, ordering from a catalog, magazine subscriptions, etc.), if sales tax was not collected at time of purchase.
“In cases where the online retailer does not have to collect sales tax, it is the customer’s responsibility to pay the tax—in which case it is known not as a sales tax but, rather, a use tax. Under California law, if an item would otherwise be subject to sales tax, it is generally subject to use tax.” I copied the statement for CA for volume’s sake. The same applies in IN, where I reside, and many other states. THISarticle has links for every state…your mileage may vary.
Since practically no one (I do) tallies up their “tax free” purchases and pays the tax on their state tax forms, governments (state and/or federal) wants to require the sellers to collect it. Legally, for the buyer, nothing has changed. It’s the sellers, as many have mentioned in this thread, who will be impacted.
Card processors can do it with the info they receive today.
Read my post #8. Some clothing is taxed in PA while most is not. Card vendors don’t get details on what is purchased, only the amount due. To do calculations correctly, you need to not only know the state, county, & municipality where it’s being sent, but specifically what is being ordered, line-by-line to properly calculate sales tax.
Also don’t forget (professional) services, some places tax them & some don’t. Your accountant or lawyer or ___ could be in another state, the probability of this rises as for people who live close to a state border.