Trying to calculate? How hard is it to incorporate a field on your online order form where someone puts in their zip code and their local sales tax is automatically applied?
Hahaha it's easy. What's the cheapest zip code? That's mine. But pls ship to my friend in Texas thx.
That's not how it works, tax is based off of tbe shipping address for mail / online order. Whatever the sales tax is in the zip code you're shipping to is what sales tax will be applied. At least that's how my employer and every other online retailer I've dealt with does it.
Sales tax is not charged by brick-and-mortar based on delivery address. Its the place the sale was conducted. Your employer did not have to before, but is now probably doing it wrong.
Oof, I'm gonna have to read up on how that will affect my tiny little business.
My current tactic of not actually selling anything may become a larger strategy.
It's worked for me so far!
I would assume platforms you would use are going to jump on this and keep it simple.
It's extremely not simple
Care to expand?
So, to begin with, the price of a thing isn't connected in portals to your location. All that work is undone because it never needed to be. Where I am only mattered to fulfillment, not payment processing. Getting that in place will cost money.
Then there's the overhead of remitting that money to all 50 states despite not being physically in 49 of them. Have a tax dispute? You need to hire a lawyer in Montana or wherever, remotely. Also one everywhere else. So liability costs go up.
And how about enforcement? How do does Connecticut stop Spool Industries from selling in their state if I refuse to pay the tax? And how do I prove you were in Hawaii on vacation when you made a purchase you intend to have shipped to your friend in Colorado?
It's complex and stupid and will cost us all more for everything we do online. It's bad for small business and bad for poor people.
I understand the increase in overhead for tax lawyer purposes, but I'm not sure why adding a couple more fields to check out wouldn't solve the other problems you've mentioned?
Because check boxes are easy to lie to and the liability is on the retailer, so it has to be robust enough a verification to catch liars and dozens of edge cases.
Then, there is also the additional overhead for accounting because the retailer is responsible for remitting the tax, in all 50 states, on their various remission schedules. Selling at brick-and-mortar retail locations in 50 States is a real challenge, it's not easy peasy and it's not straightforward at all. Forcing small retailers, local small-time booksellers who also have a storefront, all the various small Innovative businesses that make their money online to do this effectively forces them all to be National retailers. The challenge, and the costs, are high. This ruling will drive small online retailers out of business, guaranteed.
You may want to check out what the actual states are doing
South Dakota's law they passed, discussed in the opinion, applies to out of state sellers that ship more than $100,000 of goods delivered or do more than 200 transactions to deliver goods into the state
It's not as simple as "now sales tax applies to all online retailers gg"
WASHINGTON — Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.
On Thursday, the court overruled that ruling, Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, which had said that the Constitution bars states from requiring businesses to collect sales taxes unless they have a substantial connection to the state.
Shares in Amazon were down just 1 percent in morning trading after the ruling, at $1,731.59. But other e-commerce companies suffered far tougher blows: Shares in Etsy, the marketplace for artisanal crafts, fell 4.5 percent, to $42.21, while those in Wayfair, a popular home goods seller, were down 3.2 percent, at $112.42.
Writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the Quill decision had distorted the nation’s economy and had caused states to lose annual tax revenues between $8 billion and $33 billion.
“Quill puts both local businesses and many interstate businesses with physical presence at a competitive disadvantage relative to remote sellers,” he wrote. “Remote sellers can avoid the regulatory burdens of tax collection and can offer de facto lower prices caused by the widespread failure of consumers to pay the tax on their own.”
Score: 5-4: Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsbug, Alito, Gorsuch in favor, Roberts, Meyer, Sotomayor, Kagan against. Overall, I am of the opinion that online retailers should pay a lot more taxes than they do (Bezos's net worth is ridiculous), so this is good news.
Shit news that will retard the new economy. Amazon will be fine, smaller retailers will be Proper Fucked Forever while trying to calculate and collect 50 sales taxes.
If you’re not big enough to figure out how to collect the tax you’re not worth going after to go get the tax back. It will do nothing for the new economy except reduce the value of large companies that were cheating on their taxes earlier
Edit: fulfillment issues don’t really matter since endpoint is al that had ever mattered
So businesses are supposed to rely on government largesse and flying under the radar in order to be successful? What a great regime we just put in place.
Taxes are competition neutral. At the very least you’re on an even playing field rather than having a leg up over retailers in that state
Trying to calculate? How hard is it to incorporate a field on your online order form where someone puts in their zip code and their local sales tax is automatically applied?
Hahaha it's easy. What's the cheapest zip code? That's mine. But pls ship to my friend in Texas thx.
That's not how it works, tax is based off of tbe shipping address for mail / online order. Whatever the sales tax is in the zip code you're shipping to is what sales tax will be applied. At least that's how my employer and every other online retailer I've dealt with does it.
Same experience here. It actually threw me once; I was checking out and went "wait, why's that cost more than I thought it was going to", and it was because I was shipping the item somewhere with a higher sales tax than where I live.
WASHINGTON — Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.
On Thursday, the court overruled that ruling, Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, which had said that the Constitution bars states from requiring businesses to collect sales taxes unless they have a substantial connection to the state.
Shares in Amazon were down just 1 percent in morning trading after the ruling, at $1,731.59. But other e-commerce companies suffered far tougher blows: Shares in Etsy, the marketplace for artisanal crafts, fell 4.5 percent, to $42.21, while those in Wayfair, a popular home goods seller, were down 3.2 percent, at $112.42.
Writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the Quill decision had distorted the nation’s economy and had caused states to lose annual tax revenues between $8 billion and $33 billion.
“Quill puts both local businesses and many interstate businesses with physical presence at a competitive disadvantage relative to remote sellers,” he wrote. “Remote sellers can avoid the regulatory burdens of tax collection and can offer de facto lower prices caused by the widespread failure of consumers to pay the tax on their own.”
Score: 5-4: Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsbug, Alito, Gorsuch in favor, Roberts, Meyer, Sotomayor, Kagan against. Overall, I am of the opinion that online retailers should pay a lot more taxes than they do (Bezos's net worth is ridiculous), so this is good news.
Shit news that will retard the new economy. Amazon will be fine, smaller retailers will be Proper Fucked Forever while trying to calculate and collect 50 sales taxes.
If you’re not big enough to figure out how to collect the tax you’re not worth going after to go get the tax back. It will do nothing for the new economy except reduce the value of large companies that were cheating on their taxes earlier
Edit: fulfillment issues don’t really matter since endpoint is al that had ever mattered
So businesses are supposed to rely on government largesse and flying under the radar in order to be successful? What a great regime we just put in place.
Taxes are competition neutral. At the very least you’re on an even playing field rather than having a leg up over retailers in that state
This is just silly to say. Every online retailer is immediately liable for whatever sales tax laws all 50 states pass. It's not an even playing field if you get to catch one ball at a time and your competition is required to catch four dozen.
Oof, I'm gonna have to read up on how that will affect my tiny little business.
My current tactic of not actually selling anything may become a larger strategy.
It's worked for me so far!
I would assume platforms you would use are going to jump on this and keep it simple.
It's extremely not simple
Care to expand?
So, to begin with, the price of a thing isn't connected in portals to your location. All that work is undone because it never needed to be. Where I am only mattered to fulfillment, not payment processing. Getting that in place will cost money.
Then there's the overhead of remitting that money to all 50 states despite not being physically in 49 of them. Have a tax dispute? You need to hire a lawyer in Montana or wherever, remotely. Also one everywhere else. So liability costs go up.
And how about enforcement? How do does Connecticut stop Spool Industries from selling in their state if I refuse to pay the tax? And how do I prove you were in Hawaii on vacation when you made a purchase you intend to have shipped to your friend in Colorado?
It's complex and stupid and will cost us all more for everything we do online. It's bad for small business and bad for poor people.
I understand the increase in overhead for tax lawyer purposes, but I'm not sure why adding a couple more fields to check out wouldn't solve the other problems you've mentioned?
Because check boxes are easy to lie to and the liability is on the retailer, so it has to be robust enough a verification to catch liars and dozens of edge cases.
Then, there is also the additional overhead for accounting because the retailer is responsible for remitting the tax, in all 50 states, on their various remission schedules. Selling at brick-and-mortar retail locations in 50 States is a real challenge, it's not easy peasy and it's not straightforward at all. Forcing small retailers, local small-time booksellers who also have a storefront, all the various small Innovative businesses that make their money online to do this effectively forces them all to be National retailers. The challenge, and the costs, are high. This ruling will drive small online retailers out of business, guaranteed.
You may want to check out what the actual states are doing
South Dakota's law they passed, discussed in the opinion, applies to out of state sellers that ship more than $100,000 of goods delivered or do more than 200 transactions to deliver goods into the state
It's not as simple as "now sales tax applies to all online retailers gg"
WASHINGTON — Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.
On Thursday, the court overruled that ruling, Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, which had said that the Constitution bars states from requiring businesses to collect sales taxes unless they have a substantial connection to the state.
Shares in Amazon were down just 1 percent in morning trading after the ruling, at $1,731.59. But other e-commerce companies suffered far tougher blows: Shares in Etsy, the marketplace for artisanal crafts, fell 4.5 percent, to $42.21, while those in Wayfair, a popular home goods seller, were down 3.2 percent, at $112.42.
Writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the Quill decision had distorted the nation’s economy and had caused states to lose annual tax revenues between $8 billion and $33 billion.
“Quill puts both local businesses and many interstate businesses with physical presence at a competitive disadvantage relative to remote sellers,” he wrote. “Remote sellers can avoid the regulatory burdens of tax collection and can offer de facto lower prices caused by the widespread failure of consumers to pay the tax on their own.”
Score: 5-4: Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsbug, Alito, Gorsuch in favor, Roberts, Meyer, Sotomayor, Kagan against. Overall, I am of the opinion that online retailers should pay a lot more taxes than they do (Bezos's net worth is ridiculous), so this is good news.
Shit news that will retard the new economy. Amazon will be fine, smaller retailers will be Proper Fucked Forever while trying to calculate and collect 50 sales taxes.
If you’re not big enough to figure out how to collect the tax you’re not worth going after to go get the tax back. It will do nothing for the new economy except reduce the value of large companies that were cheating on their taxes earlier
Edit: fulfillment issues don’t really matter since endpoint is al that had ever mattered
So businesses are supposed to rely on government largesse and flying under the radar in order to be successful? What a great regime we just put in place.
Taxes are competition neutral. At the very least you’re on an even playing field rather than having a leg up over retailers in that state
This is just silly to say. Every online retailer is immediately liable for whatever sales tax laws all 50 states pass. It's not an even playing field if you get to catch one ball at a time and your competition is required to catch four dozen.
Well, who is their competition?
Plenty of brick and mortar stores do sell across all 50 states too, so their record keeping needs to handle sales taxes for all 50. Granted they're all large companies.
But it seems to me you're arguing that the law is stupid and so it should be ignored? Pretty sure the recourse for a stupid but valid law is to get it changed.
Oof, I'm gonna have to read up on how that will affect my tiny little business.
My current tactic of not actually selling anything may become a larger strategy.
It's worked for me so far!
I would assume platforms you would use are going to jump on this and keep it simple.
It's extremely not simple
Care to expand?
So, to begin with, the price of a thing isn't connected in portals to your location. All that work is undone because it never needed to be. Where I am only mattered to fulfillment, not payment processing. Getting that in place will cost money.
Then there's the overhead of remitting that money to all 50 states despite not being physically in 49 of them. Have a tax dispute? You need to hire a lawyer in Montana or wherever, remotely. Also one everywhere else. So liability costs go up.
And how about enforcement? How do does Connecticut stop Spool Industries from selling in their state if I refuse to pay the tax? And how do I prove you were in Hawaii on vacation when you made a purchase you intend to have shipped to your friend in Colorado?
It's complex and stupid and will cost us all more for everything we do online. It's bad for small business and bad for poor people.
I understand the increase in overhead for tax lawyer purposes, but I'm not sure why adding a couple more fields to check out wouldn't solve the other problems you've mentioned?
Because check boxes are easy to lie to and the liability is on the retailer, so it has to be robust enough a verification to catch liars and dozens of edge cases.
Then, there is also the additional overhead for accounting because the retailer is responsible for remitting the tax, in all 50 states, on their various remission schedules. Selling at brick-and-mortar retail locations in 50 States is a real challenge, it's not easy peasy and it's not straightforward at all. Forcing small retailers, local small-time booksellers who also have a storefront, all the various small Innovative businesses that make their money online to do this effectively forces them all to be National retailers. The challenge, and the costs, are high. This ruling will drive small online retailers out of business, guaranteed.
You may want to check out what the actual states are doing
South Dakota's law they passed, discussed in the opinion, applies to out of state sellers that ship more than $100,000 of goods delivered or do more than 200 transactions to deliver goods into the state
It's not as simple as "now sales tax applies to all online retailers gg"
The sales tax was always owed to the State, this loophole just meant that customers were required to put them on their annual taxes which bwahahaha.
And if a customer lies to the shop the shop is not liable for their fraud. Unless the store is actually engaging in the tax fraud itself. When I bought my wife's engagement ring they offered to ship it to my in-laws in Michigan because the tax would be lower. I didn't, because I use the services that local revenue funds. I could see that having a liabity for tax arbitrage, but if I tell you to ship something somewhere to avoid tax, but don't tell you, and then get it from that other location...how are you liable?
WASHINGTON — Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.
On Thursday, the court overruled that ruling, Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, which had said that the Constitution bars states from requiring businesses to collect sales taxes unless they have a substantial connection to the state.
Shares in Amazon were down just 1 percent in morning trading after the ruling, at $1,731.59. But other e-commerce companies suffered far tougher blows: Shares in Etsy, the marketplace for artisanal crafts, fell 4.5 percent, to $42.21, while those in Wayfair, a popular home goods seller, were down 3.2 percent, at $112.42.
Writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the Quill decision had distorted the nation’s economy and had caused states to lose annual tax revenues between $8 billion and $33 billion.
“Quill puts both local businesses and many interstate businesses with physical presence at a competitive disadvantage relative to remote sellers,” he wrote. “Remote sellers can avoid the regulatory burdens of tax collection and can offer de facto lower prices caused by the widespread failure of consumers to pay the tax on their own.”
Score: 5-4: Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsbug, Alito, Gorsuch in favor, Roberts, Meyer, Sotomayor, Kagan against. Overall, I am of the opinion that online retailers should pay a lot more taxes than they do (Bezos's net worth is ridiculous), so this is good news.
Shit news that will retard the new economy. Amazon will be fine, smaller retailers will be Proper Fucked Forever while trying to calculate and collect 50 sales taxes.
If you’re not big enough to figure out how to collect the tax you’re not worth going after to go get the tax back. It will do nothing for the new economy except reduce the value of large companies that were cheating on their taxes earlier
Edit: fulfillment issues don’t really matter since endpoint is al that had ever mattered
So businesses are supposed to rely on government largesse and flying under the radar in order to be successful? What a great regime we just put in place.
Taxes are competition neutral. At the very least you’re on an even playing field rather than having a leg up over retailers in that state
This is just silly to say. Every online retailer is immediately liable for whatever sales tax laws all 50 states pass. It's not an even playing field if you get to catch one ball at a time and your competition is required to catch four dozen.
Well, who is their competition?
Plenty of brick and mortar stores do sell across all 50 states too, so their record keeping needs to handle sales taxes for all 50. Granted they're all large companies.
But it seems to me you're arguing that the law is stupid and so it should be ignored? Pretty sure the recourse for a stupid but valid law is to get it changed.
Indeed, Kennedy mentions that Congress can legislate in this area if they so desire
And Roberts dissents saying Congress should be taking care of this, not the court
Mail Order companies managed this, Online Order companies will manage just fine.
I mean it does seem that this is a fine opportunity for a startup of some kind (or whomever does your billing in general) to say...
OK, there are lots of sales tax regimes now, and you need to be charging the right taxes. For a nominal fee we will handle all of that as part of your billing transaction step. Your customers have to submit a shipment address, we will calculate appropriate tax based on that, charge them it, and then send it to the government. We will accept the liability for errors, it will be invisible to you.
Oof, I'm gonna have to read up on how that will affect my tiny little business.
My current tactic of not actually selling anything may become a larger strategy.
It's worked for me so far!
I would assume platforms you would use are going to jump on this and keep it simple.
It's extremely not simple
Care to expand?
So, to begin with, the price of a thing isn't connected in portals to your location. All that work is undone because it never needed to be. Where I am only mattered to fulfillment, not payment processing. Getting that in place will cost money.
Then there's the overhead of remitting that money to all 50 states despite not being physically in 49 of them. Have a tax dispute? You need to hire a lawyer in Montana or wherever, remotely. Also one everywhere else. So liability costs go up.
And how about enforcement? How do does Connecticut stop Spool Industries from selling in their state if I refuse to pay the tax? And how do I prove you were in Hawaii on vacation when you made a purchase you intend to have shipped to your friend in Colorado?
It's complex and stupid and will cost us all more for everything we do online. It's bad for small business and bad for poor people.
I understand the increase in overhead for tax lawyer purposes, but I'm not sure why adding a couple more fields to check out wouldn't solve the other problems you've mentioned?
Because check boxes are easy to lie to and the liability is on the retailer, so it has to be robust enough a verification to catch liars and dozens of edge cases.
Then, there is also the additional overhead for accounting because the retailer is responsible for remitting the tax, in all 50 states, on their various remission schedules. Selling at brick-and-mortar retail locations in 50 States is a real challenge, it's not easy peasy and it's not straightforward at all. Forcing small retailers, local small-time booksellers who also have a storefront, all the various small Innovative businesses that make their money online to do this effectively forces them all to be National retailers. The challenge, and the costs, are high. This ruling will drive small online retailers out of business, guaranteed.
You may want to check out what the actual states are doing
South Dakota's law they passed, discussed in the opinion, applies to out of state sellers that ship more than $100,000 of goods delivered or do more than 200 transactions to deliver goods into the state
It's not as simple as "now sales tax applies to all online retailers gg"
Yeah, most corporate laws/regulations almost always have a minimum level under which they don't apply. Which is why the neighbor's kids don't need a permit, health department inspection, or sales tax accounting to operate a lemonade stand on their sidewalk.
Mail Order companies managed this, Online Order companies will manage just fine.
I mean it does seem that this is a fine opportunity for a startup of some kind (or whomever does your billing in general) to say...
OK, there are lots of sales tax regimes now, and you need to be charging the right taxes. For a nominal fee we will handle all of that as part of your billing transaction step. Your customers have to submit a shipment address, we will calculate appropriate tax based on that, charge them it, and then send it to the government. We will accept the liability for errors, it will be invisible to you.
I mean, people aren't mailing cash or checks to buy a not-etsy keychain. This is just going to make work for Visa &c.
Yeah I'm not really arguing that the decision is wrong yet, because I haven't read it.
I'm just saying that it's harmful and will damage the economy, drive up prices, increase consolidation, and retard innovation.
The decision is bad for America. It hurts all of us directly.
this is hyperbole
you're the one who's huge on the the republic and states having their independence!
each state having its own taxation schemes is a result of our weak fed
if a state thinks enforcing their sales taxes on out-of-state shipments would be bad for business then they needn't enact such a law
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Yeah I'm not really arguing that the decision is wrong yet, because I haven't read it.
I'm just saying that it's harmful and will damage the economy, drive up prices, increase consolidation, and retard innovation.
The decision is bad for America. It hurts all of us directly.
It will reduce municipal revenue shortfalls, increase funding for education and healthcare, increase opportunity for local physical retailers, and have no impact on innovation.
The sales tax was always owed to the State, this loophole just meant that customers were required to put them on their annual taxes which bwahahaha.
And if a customer lies to the shop the shop is not liable for their fraud. Unless the store is actually engaging in the tax fraud itself. When I bought my wife's engagement ring they offered to ship it to my in-laws in Michigan because the tax would be lower. I didn't, because I use the services that local revenue funds. I could see that having a liabity for tax arbitrage, but if I tell you to ship something somewhere to avoid tax, but don't tell you, and then get it from that other location...how are you liable?
Especially since that is arguably not very different from deciding that, even though you live in Kansas, you will go to Kansas City MO rather than Kansas City KS to shop because Kansas has a higher sales tax.
Trying to calculate? How hard is it to incorporate a field on your online order form where someone puts in their zip code and their local sales tax is automatically applied?
Hahaha it's easy. What's the cheapest zip code? That's mine. But pls ship to my friend in Texas thx.
That's not how it works, tax is based off of tbe shipping address for mail / online order. Whatever the sales tax is in the zip code you're shipping to is what sales tax will be applied. At least that's how my employer and every other online retailer I've dealt with does it.
Sales tax is not charged by brick-and-mortar based on delivery address. Its the place the sale was conducted. Your employer did not have to before, but is now probably doing it wrong.
I don't know what brick-and-mortar stores have to do with what I said. I'm talking about online retailers. If you go into a physical store, the transaction takes place at the store and sales tax is calculated where the store is. If they then ship your purchase (say you buy a new mattress and get it delivered), you still bought it there.
When you place an order online, you need to decide "where" that transaction is taking place, since no physical transaction is occuring, it's being done online. So most businesses will calculate the sales tax based on where the order is going, since that's where, presumably, the customer is.
I could see an argument that you could charge sales tax based on where the company is shipping from, but that could also get complicated based on if the company has multiple locations (Amazon has warehouses all over, my employer has four different fulfillment centers in different states). If you buy three items on Amazon but they have to ship from different warehouses, then you'd be potentially taxed differently on each item, and that seems like an even bigger mess. It also doesn't change much for many states. If you're in South Dakota and order from Florida, if the tax is calculated from Florida then that tax goes to Florida, South Dakota still gets nothing.
Since companies not charging sales tax was predicated on consumers reporting the purchase (yeah right) and paying the correct sales tax, it makes sense that salea tax would be calculated bases on where the customer is or, as explained above, shipped to.
@spool32 I went to look into how much this actually costs, since I didn't want to just go off of my gut. And payment processors don't necessarily have automated tax solutions, which I thought they would!
Don't worry though, this is America, I was able to find a company that integrates with PayPal, Square, Stripe, Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, and more with 'one click', all for the stupidly low price of $17 a month. That's for 1000 transactions a month which should be more then enough for a small-time company just tryna get off the ground. ~$0.02 per transaction, and it gets cheaper the more you do.
$17/month isn't killing anyone's innovation.
The companies this law will hurt are the large ones with more than enough resources to roll their own payment and tax systems who just don't want to implement a system and want to keep taking advantage of nominally lower retail prices by not collecting tax.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
WASHINGTON — Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.
On Thursday, the court overruled that ruling, Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, which had said that the Constitution bars states from requiring businesses to collect sales taxes unless they have a substantial connection to the state.
Shares in Amazon were down just 1 percent in morning trading after the ruling, at $1,731.59. But other e-commerce companies suffered far tougher blows: Shares in Etsy, the marketplace for artisanal crafts, fell 4.5 percent, to $42.21, while those in Wayfair, a popular home goods seller, were down 3.2 percent, at $112.42.
Writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the Quill decision had distorted the nation’s economy and had caused states to lose annual tax revenues between $8 billion and $33 billion.
“Quill puts both local businesses and many interstate businesses with physical presence at a competitive disadvantage relative to remote sellers,” he wrote. “Remote sellers can avoid the regulatory burdens of tax collection and can offer de facto lower prices caused by the widespread failure of consumers to pay the tax on their own.”
Score: 5-4: Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsbug, Alito, Gorsuch in favor, Roberts, Meyer, Sotomayor, Kagan against. Overall, I am of the opinion that online retailers should pay a lot more taxes than they do (Bezos's net worth is ridiculous), so this is good news.
Shit news that will retard the new economy. Amazon will be fine, smaller retailers will be Proper Fucked Forever while trying to calculate and collect 50 sales taxes.
If you’re not big enough to figure out how to collect the tax you’re not worth going after to go get the tax back. It will do nothing for the new economy except reduce the value of large companies that were cheating on their taxes earlier
Edit: fulfillment issues don’t really matter since endpoint is al that had ever mattered
So businesses are supposed to rely on government largesse and flying under the radar in order to be successful? What a great regime we just put in place.
Taxes are competition neutral. At the very least you’re on an even playing field rather than having a leg up over retailers in that state
This is just silly to say. Every online retailer is immediately liable for whatever sales tax laws all 50 states pass. It's not an even playing field if you get to catch one ball at a time and your competition is required to catch four dozen.
No. Look if you're not liable for state sales tax in WA because you're located in Oregon but selling to Washingtonians and shipping to them then you have nearly a 10% price advantage on Washington run businesses by avoiding the method by which our state generates revenue. This extrapolated to every state.
It was a big point of contention for Amazon years ago because by shipping from out of state warehouses they were able to claim that they did not owe any state sales tax to any state. Fortunately they ended that practice because it was bullshit*. But that didn't prevent other online retailers from doing and so getting an unfair price advantage until this decision came down.
*though to be fair i am guessing what actually happened was that the price advantage they could gain from the taxes ended up being less than the price advantage from having local warehouses in as many states as possible. But they still ended the practice and gave states their due.
Frankly, even if I was a small-time operation only selling in a single state I'd consider that $200 a year well spent! They keep track of the local tax rate, and do the reports and the filings? Can't beat that prince.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Our warehouse is located in Tennessee but we deliver into Georgia and Alabama. We have to use Alabama and Georgia sales taxes for any order that gets delivered into those states. It's been that way for as long as I can remember.
This is some real pollyanna shit, you guys. Even Vowels's cheap solution is just doing the math for you, not paying the tax or setting the prices based on location (assuming you'd want to). Their ad copy suggests you should probably have a CPA and they charge you $20 per filing, per quarter (or however often you have to file), per state you did business in, to actually pay the tax. 12 states have origin-based taxing, instead of destination-based, California does it down to the municipal level, the laws are different for wholesale vendors everywhere... transitioning from a small-scale operation to a national retailer is not trivial!
Prices will necessarily go up because overhead and complexity will go up. Sales will decrease because items will be more expensive. The tax is regressive, so the cost falls disproportionately on the poor. If you think you can bolt on a $17/mo solution and just never worry about it again, you're going to need an attorney in addition to the CPA.
But all right, yay for more taxes I guess. I'll try and spend some time reading the decision and see if I have more topical thoughts.
Meanwhile, my main takeaway is "oh hey, maybe Mom and Pop brick and mortars won't be at such a disadvantage anymore. Still have to deal with economies of scale, but not some company five states over with no tax."
No one is disputing that sales taxes are regressive.
But what relevance does that have to the decision?
Indeed, yelling at South Dakota to get itself an income tax would help solve the issue but certainly that's not the purview of SCOTUS when presented with this question
I'm starting with SCOTUSblog and I guess I should be proud of Kennedy's confidence in our software industry coming to the rescue of retailers.
"New Jersey knitters pay sales tax on yarn purchased for art projects, but not on yarn earmarked for sweaters,” Roberts said, while Texas imposes a sales tax on plain deodorant but not on deodorant with antiperspirant, and Illinois treats Twix and Snickers bars differently for sales-tax purposes."
That should be fun to work out on a per-product, per-use basis nationwide.
I don't think it's "pollyanna shit" to explore why your strong reaction may not be fully warranted.
Yes, this will effect online businesses, I don't think anyone is denying that.
That it will crush small businesses and retard innovation, for example, I think is a stretch.
The online market would not have grown as it had without Quill. Now that it's gone, some of that revenue must go to compliance instead of innovation. Either that, or we get ready for as much as $33 billion in price increases for the tax alone, not to mention the overhead of collecting and remitting it.
I don't think it's "pollyanna shit" to explore why your strong reaction may not be fully warranted.
Yes, this will effect online businesses, I don't think anyone is denying that.
That it will crush small businesses and retard innovation, for example, I think is a stretch.
The online market would not have grown as it had without Quill. Now that it's gone, some of that revenue must go to compliance instead of innovation. Either that, or we get ready for as much as $33 billion in price increases for the tax alone, not to mention the overhead of collecting and remitting it.
Okay, I don't agree that you've proven your premise here at all, but suppose you're correct - do you think it was fair or equitable to the states with sales tax that these companies, including very large national retailers, could so effectively avoid paying sales tax? Do you think it was appropriate, and still is, to expect states to go after every consumer in their state that bought something online and did not report it and pay the appropriate tax?
If the market is predicated on tax loopholes and avoiding touching a state even though you absolutely do business there, I feel like I'm okay with the market being corrected.
P.S. I live in a state with income tax, and no sales tax. So I'm already living the dream I guess.
This is some real pollyanna shit, you guys. Even Vowels's cheap solution is just doing the math for you, not paying the tax or setting the prices based on location (assuming you'd want to). Their ad copy suggests you should probably have a CPA and they charge you $20 per filing, per quarter (or however often you have to file), per state you did business in, to actually pay the tax. 12 states have origin-based taxing, instead of destination-based, California does it down to the municipal level, the laws are different for wholesale vendors everywhere... transitioning from a small-scale operation to a national retailer is not trivial!
Prices will necessarily go up because overhead and complexity will go up. Sales will decrease because items will be more expensive. The tax is regressive, so the cost falls disproportionately on the poor. If you think you can bolt on a $17/mo solution and just never worry about it again, you're going to need an attorney in addition to the CPA.
But all right, yay for more taxes I guess. I'll try and spend some time reading the decision and see if I have more topical thoughts.
Setting the prices by location would be a function of your payment processor integrating with the tax tool. User puts in zip code for delivery, payment system looks up zip in a table, the table is populated by and updated by tax tool.
Also like... people are already doing this! This tool wasn't created last night to meet a new demand, shit is already mega complicated!
If you want to make things easier for businesses we should be abolishing all state sales taxes and using a uniform federal system but I'm pretty sure you're not in favor of that... (and it would be mega unconstitutional anyway)
I dunno spool, I guess I don't feel like this opinion of yours lines up with your other beliefs on state sovereignty, and it's instead based on kneejerk 'regulation/taxes bad'. Why shouldn't a state have the right to enforce their own taxes? There's the question of which state's jurisdiction the transaction belongs to, but the states seem to have reached agreement that it's the buyer's state. (Note that none of these cases are state vs state, fighting over who gets to collect tax, is state vs business over collecting tax in the first place.) And I think that's the most logical way to do it, it's not the seller paying the taxes after all, it's the buyer.
Like what gives a theoretical company the right to ignore the laws of states they're shipping to?
Why are we taking away the rights of states to set and enforce regulations for companies doing business with their residents?
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
oh you can tell how much they hate taxes by the billions in new taxation they just unleashed.
Excuse me, taxes on the rich.
Both Rich people and Rich businesses.
No question todays rulings are (summed up to describe those it will have actual effects on)...
1) Small online businesses will need to pay some level of effort into compliance with taxes
2) Large online businesses who weren't paying taxes may be less competitive with local options
3) Rich people now have yet another way to dodge taxes
4) The redefinition of money and taxation may make it easier for us to degrade the ability of the government to tax the rich in the future
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Sales tax is not charged by brick-and-mortar based on delivery address. Its the place the sale was conducted. Your employer did not have to before, but is now probably doing it wrong.
You may want to check out what the actual states are doing
South Dakota's law they passed, discussed in the opinion, applies to out of state sellers that ship more than $100,000 of goods delivered or do more than 200 transactions to deliver goods into the state
It's not as simple as "now sales tax applies to all online retailers gg"
Taxes are competition neutral. At the very least you’re on an even playing field rather than having a leg up over retailers in that state
Same experience here. It actually threw me once; I was checking out and went "wait, why's that cost more than I thought it was going to", and it was because I was shipping the item somewhere with a higher sales tax than where I live.
http://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/index.php?page=About-Us
This is just silly to say. Every online retailer is immediately liable for whatever sales tax laws all 50 states pass. It's not an even playing field if you get to catch one ball at a time and your competition is required to catch four dozen.
What is an out of state seller in this context?
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Well, who is their competition?
Plenty of brick and mortar stores do sell across all 50 states too, so their record keeping needs to handle sales taxes for all 50. Granted they're all large companies.
But it seems to me you're arguing that the law is stupid and so it should be ignored? Pretty sure the recourse for a stupid but valid law is to get it changed.
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I don't know, I'm gathering info from the opinion (which you can read here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf)
I assume though that the law targets sellers without physical presence in the state, because that's the whole question it triggered here
And if a customer lies to the shop the shop is not liable for their fraud. Unless the store is actually engaging in the tax fraud itself. When I bought my wife's engagement ring they offered to ship it to my in-laws in Michigan because the tax would be lower. I didn't, because I use the services that local revenue funds. I could see that having a liabity for tax arbitrage, but if I tell you to ship something somewhere to avoid tax, but don't tell you, and then get it from that other location...how are you liable?
Indeed, Kennedy mentions that Congress can legislate in this area if they so desire
And Roberts dissents saying Congress should be taking care of this, not the court
I mean it does seem that this is a fine opportunity for a startup of some kind (or whomever does your billing in general) to say...
OK, there are lots of sales tax regimes now, and you need to be charging the right taxes. For a nominal fee we will handle all of that as part of your billing transaction step. Your customers have to submit a shipment address, we will calculate appropriate tax based on that, charge them it, and then send it to the government. We will accept the liability for errors, it will be invisible to you.
Yeah, most corporate laws/regulations almost always have a minimum level under which they don't apply. Which is why the neighbor's kids don't need a permit, health department inspection, or sales tax accounting to operate a lemonade stand on their sidewalk.
I mean, people aren't mailing cash or checks to buy a not-etsy keychain. This is just going to make work for Visa &c.
I'm just saying that it's harmful and will damage the economy, drive up prices, increase consolidation, and retard innovation.
The decision is bad for America. It hurts all of us directly.
this is hyperbole
you're the one who's huge on the the republic and states having their independence!
each state having its own taxation schemes is a result of our weak fed
if a state thinks enforcing their sales taxes on out-of-state shipments would be bad for business then they needn't enact such a law
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
It will reduce municipal revenue shortfalls, increase funding for education and healthcare, increase opportunity for local physical retailers, and have no impact on innovation.
Especially since that is arguably not very different from deciding that, even though you live in Kansas, you will go to Kansas City MO rather than Kansas City KS to shop because Kansas has a higher sales tax.
I don't know what brick-and-mortar stores have to do with what I said. I'm talking about online retailers. If you go into a physical store, the transaction takes place at the store and sales tax is calculated where the store is. If they then ship your purchase (say you buy a new mattress and get it delivered), you still bought it there.
When you place an order online, you need to decide "where" that transaction is taking place, since no physical transaction is occuring, it's being done online. So most businesses will calculate the sales tax based on where the order is going, since that's where, presumably, the customer is.
I could see an argument that you could charge sales tax based on where the company is shipping from, but that could also get complicated based on if the company has multiple locations (Amazon has warehouses all over, my employer has four different fulfillment centers in different states). If you buy three items on Amazon but they have to ship from different warehouses, then you'd be potentially taxed differently on each item, and that seems like an even bigger mess. It also doesn't change much for many states. If you're in South Dakota and order from Florida, if the tax is calculated from Florida then that tax goes to Florida, South Dakota still gets nothing.
Since companies not charging sales tax was predicated on consumers reporting the purchase (yeah right) and paying the correct sales tax, it makes sense that salea tax would be calculated bases on where the customer is or, as explained above, shipped to.
Don't worry though, this is America, I was able to find a company that integrates with PayPal, Square, Stripe, Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, and more with 'one click', all for the stupidly low price of $17 a month. That's for 1000 transactions a month which should be more then enough for a small-time company just tryna get off the ground. ~$0.02 per transaction, and it gets cheaper the more you do.
$17/month isn't killing anyone's innovation.
The companies this law will hurt are the large ones with more than enough resources to roll their own payment and tax systems who just don't want to implement a system and want to keep taking advantage of nominally lower retail prices by not collecting tax.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
No. Look if you're not liable for state sales tax in WA because you're located in Oregon but selling to Washingtonians and shipping to them then you have nearly a 10% price advantage on Washington run businesses by avoiding the method by which our state generates revenue. This extrapolated to every state.
It was a big point of contention for Amazon years ago because by shipping from out of state warehouses they were able to claim that they did not owe any state sales tax to any state. Fortunately they ended that practice because it was bullshit*. But that didn't prevent other online retailers from doing and so getting an unfair price advantage until this decision came down.
*though to be fair i am guessing what actually happened was that the price advantage they could gain from the taxes ended up being less than the price advantage from having local warehouses in as many states as possible. But they still ended the practice and gave states their due.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Prices will necessarily go up because overhead and complexity will go up. Sales will decrease because items will be more expensive. The tax is regressive, so the cost falls disproportionately on the poor. If you think you can bolt on a $17/mo solution and just never worry about it again, you're going to need an attorney in addition to the CPA.
But all right, yay for more taxes I guess. I'll try and spend some time reading the decision and see if I have more topical thoughts.
Yes, this will effect online businesses, I don't think anyone is denying that.
That it will crush small businesses and retard innovation, for example, I think is a stretch.
But what relevance does that have to the decision?
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Indeed, yelling at South Dakota to get itself an income tax would help solve the issue but certainly that's not the purview of SCOTUS when presented with this question
Oh wait, no, they just don't like taxes.
"New Jersey knitters pay sales tax on yarn purchased for art projects, but not on yarn earmarked for sweaters,” Roberts said, while Texas imposes a sales tax on plain deodorant but not on deodorant with antiperspirant, and Illinois treats Twix and Snickers bars differently for sales-tax purposes."
That should be fun to work out on a per-product, per-use basis nationwide.
The online market would not have grown as it had without Quill. Now that it's gone, some of that revenue must go to compliance instead of innovation. Either that, or we get ready for as much as $33 billion in price increases for the tax alone, not to mention the overhead of collecting and remitting it.
oh you can tell how much they hate taxes by the billions in new taxation they just unleashed.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Excuse me, taxes on the rich.
Well the hard core libertarian types who can still stomach taxes at all tend to prefer consumption taxes.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Okay, I don't agree that you've proven your premise here at all, but suppose you're correct - do you think it was fair or equitable to the states with sales tax that these companies, including very large national retailers, could so effectively avoid paying sales tax? Do you think it was appropriate, and still is, to expect states to go after every consumer in their state that bought something online and did not report it and pay the appropriate tax?
If the market is predicated on tax loopholes and avoiding touching a state even though you absolutely do business there, I feel like I'm okay with the market being corrected.
P.S. I live in a state with income tax, and no sales tax. So I'm already living the dream I guess.
Setting the prices by location would be a function of your payment processor integrating with the tax tool. User puts in zip code for delivery, payment system looks up zip in a table, the table is populated by and updated by tax tool.
Also like... people are already doing this! This tool wasn't created last night to meet a new demand, shit is already mega complicated!
If you want to make things easier for businesses we should be abolishing all state sales taxes and using a uniform federal system but I'm pretty sure you're not in favor of that... (and it would be mega unconstitutional anyway)
I dunno spool, I guess I don't feel like this opinion of yours lines up with your other beliefs on state sovereignty, and it's instead based on kneejerk 'regulation/taxes bad'. Why shouldn't a state have the right to enforce their own taxes? There's the question of which state's jurisdiction the transaction belongs to, but the states seem to have reached agreement that it's the buyer's state. (Note that none of these cases are state vs state, fighting over who gets to collect tax, is state vs business over collecting tax in the first place.) And I think that's the most logical way to do it, it's not the seller paying the taxes after all, it's the buyer.
Like what gives a theoretical company the right to ignore the laws of states they're shipping to?
Why are we taking away the rights of states to set and enforce regulations for companies doing business with their residents?
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Both Rich people and Rich businesses.
No question todays rulings are (summed up to describe those it will have actual effects on)...
1) Small online businesses will need to pay some level of effort into compliance with taxes
2) Large online businesses who weren't paying taxes may be less competitive with local options
3) Rich people now have yet another way to dodge taxes
4) The redefinition of money and taxation may make it easier for us to degrade the ability of the government to tax the rich in the future