Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#421

Post by conductr » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:55 AM UTC

therealpygon wrote: post #409

SecretDreams wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is in the business of selling shit. Tariffs will make them sell less stuff. By exposing the component of cost associated with tariffs, Amazon at least informs the customer why business is more expensive lately. It is "playing politics" the same way listing the effect of taxes on the final cost of something is "playing politics". This is just useful information for the consumer. It's absolutely absurd to think…

Amazing how providing facts is now “playing politics”. No one seemed to have a problem with labels when they were slapping Biden stickers on private gas pumps, but I’m sure that is totally different and way more accurate than having provable data and listing it on the cost it incurs.

[dead]

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#422

Post by gamblor956 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 6:30 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #391

gamblor956 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this silly? If you're selling something, sales tax (or in other parts of the world, VAT or GST) will be owed[1]. Different places will have different levels of commerce and budgetary requirements, and sales taxes are one of the ways they can fill their coffers. Allowing for local jurisdictions to set their own tax rates is part of the federal system of government; indeed in the U.S. it is arguable that a natio…

> Why is this silly? Because it's an immense amount of paperwork, compliance, legal risk, etc. all to avoid just setting a more reasonable state/federal level of taxation. The US has a deeply weird attitude towards any changes to taxation. > And why should we eliminate sales taxes, etc. for online sales? No one's proposing that. Online sales just introduce the issue of not knowing the tax jurisdiction that's applicab…

just setting a more reasonable state/federal level of taxation.

We have reasonable levels of taxation right now. 0% federal rate, because the Constitution does not allow for a federal sales tax. States can set their own rates based on their own needs, just like every member of the EU can set its own rate. And counties and cities can tag-along with their state's sales tax.

This was complicated back in the day when it was all paper tables. Software makes it easy. Excel makes it easy, and the dedicated sales tax SaaS make it even easier.

At my last company, we handled hundreds of thousands of sales a day globally and my tax department spent less than four hours each month on sales tax/VAT compliance because we used Avalara to handle sales tax rate lookups and compliance. (The four hours were for filing the VAT returns in the two dozen countries we couldn't file through Avalara.) To put it in terms a programmer would understand: each month, my entire department spent less time on sales tax compliance than the average Typescript programmer spends on compiling.

Online sales just introduce the issue of not knowing the tax jurisdiction that's applicable for a brand-new shopper.

That has been an issue for decades, and people got along just fine in the days when they had to do it by hand.

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#423

Post by atoav » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:15 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #408

atoav wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not well thought out"? This was the equivalent of putting on a blindfold and throwing random darts at a world map. On top of that the reasons they gave are contradictory, because in the end the truth is the tariffs were based on the vibes one specific man had held since the 80s. However the world is very different since then. Not even the numbers make sense. If the goal was to punish people with whom the US has a hi…

Let's be careful. It wasn't really "vibes", especially not at the start. There was a very clear cut ("simplistic" would be too generous) formula that determined the tariffs. Granted, probably the tone of the "negotiations" since then has been vibe-influenced...

The formula is utterly nonsensical.

Sorry, but I have first semester art students who apply more care when choosing electronic components for their first project after 8 hours of instructions. And art students are not exactly known to be math-heads.

The first thing you'd do is to check for edge cases, like how the formula treats countries that you just extract wealth from like Lesotho. If you have 10 interns spending 20 minutes on each of the 194 countries that takes you a single 8 hour work day tops.

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#424

Post by nebula8804 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #350

rafram wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no more "as QoL in China improves." You start with this, but then the rest of your comment is totally unrelated. Could you elaborate?

China is already producing top-tier parts at the current set wages. Wages are unlikely to increase as quality of production goes up - it's already world class. That's the argument as I see it at least. I tend to mostly agree, with some carve-outs for highly specialized industry and general "social" differences in how business is typically done. At this point, if you need basic manufacturing - China seems unbeatable o…

That will only last as long as their current generation is not in retirement age (10-20 years left). They have among the worst replacement rates in the world. Its too late to fix that. Afterwards China either becomes fully automated in an extreme fashion or they exit from the world stage as a manufacturing powerhouse. If they become robotic everyone else can as well.

Also on that note Robots are going to have to become real cheap, I suspect the reason they are so good at everything is because there is so much competition from 1+ billion people its that cutthroat

Robots will have to become cheaper than all these people assembling a generic bluetooth speaker or the price will go up eventually tariffs or not...go ahead count the number of people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#425

Post by pentamassiv » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 9:25 AM UTC

xienze wrote: post #237

ceejayoz wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other countries have states and cities, too. (And in the fast food example, the customer's home location doesn't matter. The store's does.)

But do they have the same kind of state and local sales tax rules that we do? Again, _you can't know the price to display if you don't know where exactly in the country the package is going_. It is not possible to display the "final price" in US online stores ahead of checkout unless the user is already logged in AND the shipping address is the same as where the user lives. The juice is not worth the squeeze for onli…

There are a lot of people who cannot calculate what 10% more equals to. You mentioned that's an estimate and often not correct, so even if you do the calculation, there's a good chance it's wrong. A lot of people are on a budget and what is a rounding error to you, could be the difference between being able to afford it or not for them.

In Germany different tax rates apply to items that you need to survive such as food and other goods. It can be difficult to know which rate applies to a product. The good thing is you don't need to know because the total price is displayed

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#426

Post by littlestymaar » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 10:05 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #394

graemep wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil has varied in a range of about 23% in the last few weeks, and the USD to CNY rate. Raw material for many things (like plastics) and obviously used for transport.

Oil has gone down, though, and the primary driver for the volatility was the tariffs. It’s not like there was a big change in production or something like the pandemic causing millions of people to change their driving habits. Again, the question is simply what non-tariff factor would explain non-trivial prices over a month? If there isn’t one, it doesn’t seem unfair to attribute the increase to a huge policy change.

> Again, the question is simply what non-tariff factor would explain non-trivial prices over a month?

Having the most economically clueless US president in a century and watching his erratic behavior in real time.

Tariffs are only a small piece of the puzzle.

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#427

Post by throwaway7894 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 1:06 PM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #247

throwaway7894 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your example, why would the domestic seller keep their price at $5 if the other option costs $15? They'll just raise the price of the domestic good to $13 and we will all pay $8 extra on a thing that used to cost $5. If the price displayed is still $5 but tariffs added at the end, the domestic seller's $13 sticker price will not look attractive to buyers.

To capture market share. For goods that have alternatives, businesses may choose to under-price (relative to their tariffed competitors) in order to gain sales and customers.

Right, but they'll underprice just below the floor price for the imported good, because why would businesses leave money on the table?

The choice for consumers won't be "choose between a $5 item and $15 item" it will be "choose between $13 and $15", like I mentioned above.

This doesn't work as easily if the sticker price for the imported good is $5 and the real price displayed at the end of the purchasing funnel. The local business will have to keep its sticker price at $5 to avoid losing customers when they initially compare goods or rely on customers to come back to them once they get faced with the tariff tax, which will also lose customers.

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#428

Post by xtiansimon » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

xtiansimon wrote: post #84

Interesting. AliExpress added this last week as a line item cost during checkout. I took up a new hobby in 2021 and was buying materials from Amazon and eBay. There’s more transparency on eBay for products shipped directly from China. As a result I stated to realize when shopping on Amazon (and not buying a known Branded Manufacturer, but choosing same category product at lower price) I was buying the exact same low…

YOINK! That didn't last long. British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr calls the "tech bros" (Elon, Jeff, Mark) "hostages" of the Trump administration.

https://youtu.be/TZOoT8AbkNE

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#429

Post by tmottabr » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

ytpete wrote: post #396

echoangle wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's perfectly rational though. Stuff is priced taking into account the current value, and a raising crude oil price immediately increases the value of the already refined product. Just like falling prices would immediately lower the value of the already refined product.

Do falling prices in crude oil reflect in gas prices as instantly as rising prices in crude oil do though? I think that asymmetry is what the poster was calling out. It lets resellers skim a bit of extra profit off of the volatility, by raising prices quickly but lagging on lowering them.

The rational is more or less like this..

And i know i simplifying things A LOT here.. but that is the mentality behind it..

When crude oil price go up then gas station raise their prices because they know next they they buy it will be more expansive and they will need more money to afford it, so they raise their prices prices immediately..

On the other hand, if crude oil prices drop, it means that next time they buy it will be cheaper, but the gas they currently have was expensive, so they need to keep the prices up to recover what they already paid for it..

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#430

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #422

ceejayoz wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this silly? Because it's an immense amount of paperwork, compliance, legal risk, etc. all to avoid just setting a more reasonable state/federal level of taxation. The US has a deeply weird attitude towards any changes to taxation. > And why should we eliminate sales taxes, etc. for online sales? No one's proposing that. Online sales just introduce the issue of not knowing the tax jurisdiction that's applicab…

just setting a more reasonable state/federal level of taxation. We have reasonable levels of taxation right now. 0% federal rate, because the Constitution does not allow for a federal sales tax. States can set their own rates based on their own needs, just like every member of the EU can set its own rate. And counties and cities can tag-along with their state's sales tax. This was complicated back in the day when it…

> 0% federal rate, because the Constitution does not allow for a federal sales tax.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sales_tax

"The federal government could theoretically levy a nationwide federal sales tax under Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, but Congress has declined to do so."

(And I'm advocating for a higher state/Federal income tax rate so we don't need sales tax rates to make up the budget gaps we fill with sales taxes today.)

> To put it in terms a programmer would understand: each month, my entire department spent less time on sales tax compliance than the average Typescript programmer spends on compiling.

Sure. Because you outsourced that work to a third-party. Who doesn't work for free. You pass that cost to your customers, yes?