481–490 of 613 posts
What no one is talking about here is how this would be handled, especially for a small online sellers. There are almost 10,000 tax jurisdictions ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/mccon... ) and you're not allowed to collect sales tax unless you register for that jurisdiction. There is also a fee collected by most jurisdictions to register and most make you send in periodic reports, even if you…
It's very simple how it would be handled: (1) very large organizations with retail over a wide area as a core business focus would handle relations with taxing jurisdictions directly as a central function. (2) medium scale organizations would outsource tax compliance to specialized vendors that would handle it. (3) very small organizations would either do the same as medium orgs (assuming vendors handle them) or just…
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Shopify/BigCommerce/Authorize.net/eBay/Amazon, etc. will handle it for you. Everyone uses SaaS software at some point in the process nowadays.
Arguments like this annoy me. Someone has it figured out so it's OK for these complex tax implementations to exist. No, it's not OK, and it's not a solved problem. We recently implemented sales tax collection using the TaxJar API combined with Stripe. It took at least a month to integrate. These integrations are huge drains on business productivity. Government has to stop creating these complex rules. Create simple r…
The end result is smaller busineeses get stomped. Only solution i see is to streamline it with software. Software is getting easier to use so hopefully it becomes less burdensome.
This decision has effectively killed the "internet lemonade stand", where a person with a bit of web knowledge could go online and a day or two later have a store that sold something. Oh sure, you can still do that. But now it's going to all be channeled through gatekeepers that will ensure regulatory compliance. And run their own little walled gardens. Better not tick them off. (This is a nice little website you hav…
Yes on international, just bought a one plus phone, came from Hong Kong, not one penny in sales tax. Quite the advantage over the iPhone x where I would have paid close to 100$ in sales tax.
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$100,000 in sales is a very low bar. That's equivalent to a business with a single employee, the owner, and they're probably not making a livable wage yet.
$100k of South Dakota revenue is either an almost exclusively local single-owner business or a much larger internet shop. But regardless, that kind of number is a full time job. If you're selling over the internet and making a full time job out of it, you can handle computing sales tax for SD residents. Yes, it's burdensome. Yes, it would be good to have a simpler federal framework for this. No, it's not the end of t…
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That's still difficult to comply with. Imagine 50 different laws like that, each with their own tiers, and consider the difficulty accounting for them all and staying in compliance. That's not even getting into municipal taxes.
Not to mention remitting the money to the proper place. Not a trivial matter at all.
I have a hunch that this will, in the end, be a massive win for large retailers vs. small ones. The task of figuring out how to calculate tax for all states is more or less the same amount of work regardless of size, which means for someone like Amazon it's more or less trivial, but for a mom-and-pop store it's a major hassle.
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.
Cheaper to just hire avalara to do it for you.
I have a hunch that this will, in the end, be a massive win for large retailers vs. small ones. The task of figuring out how to calculate tax for all states is more or less the same amount of work regardless of size, which means for someone like Amazon it's more or less trivial, but for a mom-and-pop store it's a major hassle.
Thankfully with Shopify it is extremely easy and straightforward to manage for my wife's small online store. Their platform does a great job properly charging taxes by state, county and city in certain situations. Then using an inexpensive plan from https://www.taxjar.com/ the entire filing and paying process is 100% automated. In 10 minutes I was able to file and pay all the sales taxes to several state, dozens of C…
I have a hunch that this will, in the end, be a massive win for large retailers vs. small ones. The task of figuring out how to calculate tax for all states is more or less the same amount of work regardless of size, which means for someone like Amazon it's more or less trivial, but for a mom-and-pop store it's a major hassle.
That is an interesting take on it. I was thinking it would be more of a level playing field for small physical retailers if the larger online stores had to charge the same retail tax. My thoughts were that if you bought something from a store it would be x% more expensive with sales tax than purchasing off of amazon and having it delivered without needing to pay sales tax. This way both have to charge the same sales…
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With fee, do you mean that you have to pay a yearly fee for simply registering as possibly collecting taxes for that jurisdiction? Not sure what most is, but ~30-50 pay-to-play fee's a year will certainly hurt the small businesses. I think it's good to start harmonizing the sales taxes, but such a fee (if I understand you correctly) should be removed...
I'm in Colorado and I had to pay $66 up front. $50 is a deposit and $16 is the fee every two years. I see that California doesn't have a fee but I know other states do. TaxJar will register for you in the States that you need for ~$100 per state, plus their fees ( https://www.taxjar.com/state-registrations/ ) -- I'm sure Avalara does something similar but that's ~$5000 that a small business probably won't have.
It's a system designed ages ago, not only pre-internet, but even pre-car.
For internet businesses it's really unworkable to require they submit anything other than state sales tax but even that is onerous due to registration fees and old and nonstandardized submission systems.