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This is great news for Amazon. They already collect sales tax on everything they sell in most states (47 I think?). Now that smaller sellers (marketplace sellers, eBay, etc.) also have to collect tax, that hurts the ~8% discount built in, so why even shop around?
This is great news for Amazon. They already collect sales tax on everything they sell in most states (47 I think?). Now that smaller sellers (marketplace sellers, eBay, etc.) also have to collect tax, that hurts the ~8% discount built in, so why even shop around?
More compliance and regulation for us to deal with. How about you just tax property? It doesn't move. And also, how about the state stops spending money?
Note, this ruling doesn’t mean that all businesses will immediately be taxed. The law over which this suit was filed requires collection if your annual business in the state is $100,000 or >200 sales, which means you’re already doing a sizeable business.
Someone needs to develop a service to make calculating and paying the sales tax easier. Something like plugin an address and it spits out the tax percentage and where to remit the payment to. Ideally the states would get together and create a centralized service so companies don't have to be mailing checks to every single county government that has a sales tax.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Payment processing services will most likely provide a solution to do this automatically. Charging credit cards is already pretty complicated, and they abstract it away already, so it would make sense for them to provide this as an additional service.
Agreed. I envision "tax compliance as a service" being offered by processors or third parties. My only question is then whether individual municipalities in states that allow them to have their own sales tax will also now be able to force compliance. If that's the case, what a nightmare for online retailers.
We even had areas where we could not find the correct tax because the government in charge refused to tell us
I find it hard to argue with from a fairness perspective. Clearly, retail is in a much different place from when Quill was decided. My concern is more in how a mom & pop online shop operating independently complies as a practical matter, which means not only collecting the right amount for different types of items but presumably remitting and filing with a huge number of different tax jurisdictions.
In Colorado you're already asked when filing state taxes what the value of the goods you bought online that haven't been taxed yet, so the onus is on the filer to look up receipts from the year for tax purposes. Amazon already collects tax in Colorado, but a few smaller retailers will send you a letter at the end of the year totaling up your untaxed purchases. Since different counties and localities collect different…
Fascinating mix of justices on this one: > The vote was 5 to 4. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch. I can't imagine we're gonna see RBG agreeing with the Alito/Gorsuch/Thomas clan too often.
This is good news for the country, even if it's bad for my wallet. The prior state of affairs was absurd. Online retailers already have major advantages in terms of convenience and inventory. Getting a N% discount vs. brick and mortar by not charging taxes was completely unnecessary.
It’s good for big business and bad for small businesses because compliance will be tough, and harder to compete and price.
I find it hard to argue with from a fairness perspective. Clearly, retail is in a much different place from when Quill was decided. My concern is more in how a mom & pop online shop operating independently complies as a practical matter, which means not only collecting the right amount for different types of items but presumably remitting and filing with a huge number of different tax jurisdictions.
One is that they don't use the infrastructure in the state. Shippers are either already taxed for their use if private or self funding government in the case of UPS.
The second is a more slippery taxation without representation which also gets into all sorts of semantic issues with who is really being taxed the in state residents or the out of state residents.
Really the tax infrastructure is in drastic need of modernization and streamlining. It may step on a lot of toes but I could see forcing online sales tax into a federal fixed rate with redistributed fixed percentages as worth it. Say 5% rate nationally and of that 1/3rd each to the buyer's state and the seller's state and 1/6th to each municipality respectively with it defaulting to the state if it is unincorporated. It would even actually fit in interstate commerce domain nicely.
More compliance and regulation for us to deal with. How about you just tax property? It doesn't move. And also, how about the state stops spending money?
Thankfully, we have computers! Any online sales program worth paying for includes automatic sales tax collection by jurisdiction. Note, this ruling doesn’t mean that all businesses will immediately be taxed. The law over which this suit was filed requires collection if your annual business in the state is $100,000 or >200 sales, which means you’re already doing a sizeable business.
There's a lot of faxing, forms to fill, etc.
So most of the value is the vendor doing the legwork in keeping up with details and fixing corner cases. And leveraging their pre-existing trust network and economy of scale.