Eventually, maybe as soon as next year, there will be a sales tax on Internet sales. If we leave this task up to each State we will have a jumbled mess, look what they are doing right now with the Affiliate wars.

If we leave it up to the Feds it will be a mess also. I hate taxes and they are never fairly enforced. As online retailers we need to get in their and negotiate an equitable plan rather than let the Government decide this.

Just my 15%

alexandria teeth whitening

I don’t know you but should. tking@oz.net. 206-232-3340

Thanks,
Tom King

I don’t buy it. It is already done. Amazon requires me to list in a sales tax category. They collect and remit.

The software industry is attempting to sign up millions of small entrepreneurs on monthly subscriptions. Boon for software companies writing the programs, boondoggle for small companies paying the freight. I am exiting this business sooner rather than later for ill-explored solutions such as you pose.

Make the states pay the freight. I employ 7 people. When I close, soon, there will be seven less jobs (8 including me). Maybe GM will make a radical comeback??? I don’t want to deal with this, and won’t. This plan will kill decent paying jobs.

Sincerely,
Tom

50 tax jurisdictions would not require complicated zip code / tax subscriptions. So we could even charge the highest tax rate for each state, and come out ahead compared to sending 100s of 44-cent checks to various cities and counties.

I worry that many small-business websites won’t have the processing power or bandwith to handle calculating or requesting data for 5,000 - 7,000 separate tax jurisdictions (especially if they also have to access a complicated mixture of “which items are taxable in which locations?”).

For Washington state, we use Avalara and it works fairly well - but when severe weather or other issues have downed their site, our online store order importing “hung” every time it hit a WA-state address.
Order processing was smoother and faster when we could apply our local WA sales tax rate instead of having to access Avalara’s website for every taxable WA transaction.

David,
The software to classify each and every product for appropriate tax rate sounds useful. But once again, I can forsee server processing or bandwidth issues. We’re not a huge company, but we have a lot of products: nearly 20,000 small craft components, made from a wide variety of materials. Are hooks-and-eyes or rhinestones destined for apparel taxed differently than the same product destined for jewelry? And is a beadazzeled belt apparel or jewelry? And is that only in some states? Seems like we’ll need an extra 50 slots in our database for each product, to note which states it is taxable in - and hopefully there aren’t items that are taxable in only certain counties. If so, I (honestly) wish you & the rest of this country much good luck on simplifying or unravelling the apparel, food, etc. taxation rules to make simplified taxation possible!

Also, our online store program does not auto-complete the customer’s address. If they give us just 5 digits, our online store doesn’t go seek out a +4, so the sales tax returned might not be authorized accurately — it might be higher or lower once we verify the address with our in-house processing system. (However, it’s true that if the customer’s zip is associated with multiple taxation zones, then Avalara’s software asks them to choose from a short list — but that list includes post office “zones” that the customers haven’t ever heard of, which makes us look a bit loopy to some of them - and I had a case yesterday where the customer picked the wrong zone from the list, so their tax returned about 50 cents lower that reality. An under-auth of even a few cents, if we don’t notice it and handle it special, will cause this customer the “dreaded double hold” on their debit card funds.)

It sounds like it might become VERY important that our online store programmers find a way to hook up the checkout to something similar to CASS software, to format the customer’s address & add +4, and then ask the customer to verify that this address still looks valid to them — sometimes when you run an address through address validation software, it returns a very wacky result, so it would be nice for the customer to get a chance to ok it and edit if necessary.
But that’s one more step towards cart abandonment… another thing that doesn’t spur the economy and make the states or us any money!

And then onto Use Tax… For our customer base, Use Tax seems like another matter entirely: Our wholesale customers buy our components and turn them into finished goods which they sell. Occasionally, they also re-sell the components un-altered. Use tax comes into play when they purchase single tools or single books for Personal Use rather than to sell. Only our customer knows for sure if they are going to Use the item to make their handcrafts, or sell the item to their own craft customer — so for these items we inform them about Use Tax so they can report it for that item if/when appropriate.