It never made sense all along that internet sales were not subject to sales tax. The US sales tax system is so beyond fucked up. There are literally thousands of sales tax jurisdictions all collecting separately and at different rates not just by state or even by county but by towns and cities too. For years I’ve always thought the most common sense thing would be to charge a flat internet tax of something like say 4% across the board.
Charging different rates in person isn’t a huge deal for business that reside in a single building in a single jurisdiction but every year I literally sell to 50 states and probably 5,000 unique tax jurisdictions. It just isn’t realistic for me to deal with all of those, but I am glad eBay now has to.
I am insanely happy as a seller to be able to stop having to remit to NY and just close that account all together. eBay didn’t even offer a way for me to charge the specific to the about 84 jurisdictions in NY.
I do my shit legit on eBay. I can still buy items for resale tax free. I will have to supply my resale certificate to eBay and then my exemption will automatically apply like it does everywhere else. This will hurt tax evader flippers who don’t pay income tax. I love this from every angle.
I’m in Connecticut. I’m already feeling the sting. I’m taxed on all my purchases and my buyers are taxed on all their purchases. There was a good daily deal for a tech product but with tax I was paying $10 more than if I purchased it from Amazon or any other retailer. Ebay lost out on my purchase. Hope they feel the sting as well.
These taxes hinder small businesses 100%, why would you want to incentivize people opening up physical retail stores in this day and age? That is not the future of small business. Unpopular opinion but I never understood the ‘support your local businesses’ line I would rather support an enterprising online seller who’s prices are consistent to the market not supporting the inflated physical store markups just because Becky and Rob are local legends who opened up a store.
P.S.
I am referring to the local market here in Australia, I imagine it is much different in the US for example where prices are more competitive to online retailers. But here in Australia you will pay insane markups by walking in store especially in terms of collectibles.
Not sure why you would want to squelch the entrepreneurial spirit present in so many of your neighbors. By not patronizing them, you are eliminating them. I’d rather pay them more because they contribute to the health of the community by hiring your other neighbors as well as their kids. Kids learn a lot thru this. Google won’t be hiring them.
@garyis2000 That may be an option more so in the US than in Australia. Think more along the lines of paying $300 for a played Charizard to support your local store whereas a small online business owner has the similar quality card for $75 etc. If that online seller becomes successful they will hire employees just like a retail store.
Except I wasn’t talking about card shops. I’m talking about the corner market, hardware store, liquor store etc.
Were you talking about just card shops? If so, then I would pay more but not quadruple like in your example.
Yeah I was talking about collectibles but it applies elsewhere, mom and pop stores are virtually non existent here in Aus it is 99.99% large retailers and franchises. It is not economical for any small business to pay rent at any reasonable location here the rent is not compatible with foot traffic you would have to be selling at insane markups to stay afloat (the few that exist do).
I wish Australia had the same small business environment as the US but it is just not feasable given the current property market and I would gladly support that movement but I would rather use my $300 to support 4 online small businesses than 1 local store at a $300 purchase.
Very different story 30 years ago, corner stores were king. I hope for your sake it doesn’t turn out like it did here but I think the US has a very strong drive for local enterprise so I dont think the mom and pop will disappear like it did here.
It seems that the issue isn’t that there are new taxes, the issue is that they’re standard taxes that are unequally enforced. What the failure to tax online purchases has done is contributed to driving people away from traditional brick-and-mortar stores (be they massive retailers or mom-and-pop shops) because people can get their sales tax off by ordering online.
Ideally we would have uniform tax enforcement and policies for taxing things like inter-state purchases. That would deal with points 1 and 2, the decrease in consumer spending, because you’d always have to pay the tax no matter where you purchased. A bigger problem than this policy seems to be the failure of government (no matter who’s running it) to pay attention to small businesses and forcing them to play by the tax rules while massive corporations like Amazon and Walmart get to pay zero in federal taxes.
I have a hard time believing this wont have a significant impact on big sales. I’m looking to sell one of my shadowless zards in psa 8, but if someone pays the 700 I’m hoping for it with be 770? That’s a ton extra!
I do this as a hobby, not as a business, so I get why this is great for someone that buys mass quantities of cards and sells a ton, but for me it definitely stinks and hurts my ability to grow my collection. I’m not going to buy items for resale tax free, but I also try to not be a major flipper. All this amounts to much slower spending and being more careful with my purchases.
This is not going to even briefly save mom and pop nor hurt Amazon. Even big box stores are going to disappear because delivery to your door is where everything is headed. More than anything, this is going to sting eBay and especially the small sellers that use it.
Here in Canada it is a huge incentive to buy from someone in the country or outside that will underdeclare on anything $20 and over(might have or will be going up to $100). eBay is gonna take a huge loss with people steering sales off the platform and so will anyone who plays by the rules.
I keep seeing things in here about people going to Amazon and not paying sales tax on purchases and people being driven to Amazon instead of eBay now to avoid the sales tax. Amazon has been charging sales tax in the 45 states uniformly per each jurisdictions legal rates for some time now. I have not been able to make a sales tax free purchase on Amazon aside from anything for resale using my resale certificate for at least a few years. Perhaps third party sellers don’t charge it from time to time but they are breaking the law technically if so. Technically I’ve been breaking the law by not collecting thousands of jurisdictions worth of sales taxes for all my sales on eBay. Nobody pursues it since it’s an unreasonable burden for small time sellers to handle but that is why the burden was put on Amazon and is phasing in on eBay itself.
Amazon was only able to not pay any Federal taxes the past 2 years due to the recent corporate welfare err tax cuts. They pay little in corporate taxes because the way taxes work are that you don’t pay taxes on revenues but on profits and when you have built massive loads of infrastructure over the past 10+ years that you are depreciating on paper it looks like you aren’t profiting. But the salaries that they pay are taxed, the sales that they make are mostly subject to sales tax and a lot of taxes are gathered from their existence.
It is funny to me that people don’t want to pay taxes so they just point to Amazon who is actually paying all the taxes they are legally required to pay. And the amount they pay is much more than the headline grabbing “$0 Federal” that is reported for political and clickbait reasons.
Quick statement on having to deal with ego’s and epeen’s. Disagreeing is one thing, name calling is another. Stop crossing that line or start paying me for the time I have to waste babysitting adults.
At the end of the day, we all love the same hobby! Don’t let the heat of the moment burn you!
