14 ms·

$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.

nemo44x 8y ago
I think that's the point. It's supplemental income for someone - not a real business.
tgb 8y ago
That's not their entire sales, that's their entire sales to people in South Dakota.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
  If you do business nationally, with a million in revenue, $100k for South Dakota might not seem too bad, but $100k for California or Texas starts to feel really claustrophobic. It's an interesting precedent.
  - markdown 8y ago
    It's $100k or 200 transactions. 200 transactions is just 17 customers with a monthly subscription.
ajross 8y ago
$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 the world. "No tax on the internet" sort of made sense in 1997 when it was a new and exciting market and we wanted to see what would happen. Now, it's just a giant subsidy for Amazon. We can put that money to better uses.
- ballenf 8y ago
  I think you've got it kind of backwards. The absence of tax collection is what allowed Amazon to become Amazon and this change is now a barrier to a new entity challenging Amazon. Amazon voluntarily started collecting taxes nationwide without a blip to its bottom line. The new law will in fact put Amazon's first-party goods in parity with 3rd party sales. Third party sellers could often undercut Amazon's own pricing due to the disparity. This tax change is a huge win for Amazon on many fronts. Any protests they make to the contrary are strategic, imo.
  - Eliezer 8y ago
    The stock market disagrees with you.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    It's a win for a part of Amazon's business, the part that stocks and sells its own products and is already collecting taxes. It's a loss for the other, larger side that gets paid to stock and ship products from 3rd parties who by and large do not collect tax. This makes it tougher for these small businesses to compete and since Amazon takes 15% of those sales AND makes money off them for fulfillment services.
  - smallnamespace 8y ago
    All this would do is create an opportunity for a SaaS startup or existing payments provider to offer collecting the correct amount of tax for you. I personally worked on this sort of problem for a large company; most of the work is in figuring out what the business logic ought to be; turning it into code is (largely) trivial. Figuring out the logic only needs to be done once, and the payments provider is the natural place for it to live.
    - SyneRyder 8y ago
      Indeed, several already do this - Fastspring, Paddle, and there are services like Taxamo (although I'm not sure if Taxamo actually remit the tax on your behalf, or are just an API to calculate what your obligations are).
megy 8y ago
For one state, so 50x that, which is $5m.

nemo44x 8y ago

I think that's the point. It's supplemental income for someone - not a real business.

tgb 8y ago

That's not their entire sales, that's their entire sales to people in South Dakota.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
If you do business nationally, with a million in revenue, $100k for South Dakota might not seem too bad, but $100k for California or Texas starts to feel really claustrophobic. It's an interesting precedent.
- markdown 8y ago
  It's $100k or 200 transactions. 200 transactions is just 17 customers with a monthly subscription.

ajross 8y ago

$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 the world. "No tax on the internet" sort of made sense in 1997 when it was a new and exciting market and we wanted to see what would happen. Now, it's just a giant subsidy for Amazon. We can put that money to better uses.

ballenf 8y ago
I think you've got it kind of backwards. The absence of tax collection is what allowed Amazon to become Amazon and this change is now a barrier to a new entity challenging Amazon. Amazon voluntarily started collecting taxes nationwide without a blip to its bottom line. The new law will in fact put Amazon's first-party goods in parity with 3rd party sales. Third party sellers could often undercut Amazon's own pricing due to the disparity. This tax change is a huge win for Amazon on many fronts. Any protests they make to the contrary are strategic, imo.
- Eliezer 8y ago
  The stock market disagrees with you.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  It's a win for a part of Amazon's business, the part that stocks and sells its own products and is already collecting taxes. It's a loss for the other, larger side that gets paid to stock and ship products from 3rd parties who by and large do not collect tax. This makes it tougher for these small businesses to compete and since Amazon takes 15% of those sales AND makes money off them for fulfillment services.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  All this would do is create an opportunity for a SaaS startup or existing payments provider to offer collecting the correct amount of tax for you. I personally worked on this sort of problem for a large company; most of the work is in figuring out what the business logic ought to be; turning it into code is (largely) trivial. Figuring out the logic only needs to be done once, and the payments provider is the natural place for it to live.
  - SyneRyder 8y ago
    Indeed, several already do this - Fastspring, Paddle, and there are services like Taxamo (although I'm not sure if Taxamo actually remit the tax on your behalf, or are just an API to calculate what your obligations are).

megy 8y ago

For one state, so 50x that, which is $5m.