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With 2 day shipping through the prime service, they pretty much emulate a local retailer. The prices are awesome but I can see how their tax advantages give the
by babl 15y ago
With 2 day shipping through the prime service, they pretty much emulate a local retailer. The prices are awesome but I can see how their tax advantages give them an unfair advantage on local competition.
- X-Istence 15y agoBecause the user that is receiving the item is tax dodging Amazon should be punished?
- awa 15y agoNot punished, just asked that they collect sales tax instead of relying on customers to pay use tax.
- NoPiece 15y agoLook at this not in terms of a big company like Amazon, but a start up or mom and pop web retailer which would be required to collect and distribute taxes to 50 different states. What a nightmare. The "no physical presence" exemption makes sense, and is very important.
- babl 15y agoTrue, but Amazon probably makes close to a billion in annual revenue in CA, I feel like that must account for some kind of taxable "presence."
- dangrossman 15y ago50 different states and at least several thousand distinct regions (counties, cities, townships, etc) with different sales tax rates and different taxable item classifications. You can't even tell which one a customer lives in by their address.
- awa 15y agouhmm.. so you mean to say Walmart.com have people who can handle problem this but Amazon cannot!? To me, the implicit 10% discount to customer seems like major incentive for Amazon to not to do this rather than the technical difficulty of the issue. I understand a startup having difficulty spending resources doing this, but not many startups have affiliates, Also, we should be worried that Amazon will cause states to make laws which will ultimately harm startups.
- aphexairlines 15y agoThis is why Amazon's management has stated several times that they would prefer a national sales tax than dealing with this mess.
- r00fus 15y agoAmazon ran Target.com's web store... They know well how to solve this problem because they already did it! Complexity is a flimsy excuse for a giant like Amazon.
- babl 15y agoI wasn't aware anyone actually declared their Amazon purchases at tax time.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Anechoic 15y agoI do. Seriously.
- dangrossman 15y agoI do. Amazon purchases are usually all I end up reporting, too -- not many other sites I buy things from that aren't the sites of brick-and-mortar stores (which collect the sales tax). Especially if you are self-employed or own a business, the chances of NOT being audited eventually while never reporting any use taxes are not good.
- dprice1 15y agoI do as well. I sum up my online purchases from Amazon, add my wife's in, and pay the money. It goes to funding the things I use: Roads, firefighters, the library, the park next to my house. Heck, there was a fire two weeks ago in the apartment building next to where I live-- we sure as hell appreciated the firemen who came at 4:00am to prevent a catastrophe. The argument above about how it's impossible/expensive/complicated/etc. to collect sales tax seems exceedingly bogus to me especially given the nature of HN: Sounds like a business problem to be solved, not some byzantine task. Someone should go make an online sales-tax-computing web service and be done with it. Oh wait, someone did: http://salestaxwebservice.com/ http://salestaxwebservice.com/, http://www.avalara.com/products/avatax/calc http://www.avalara.com/products/avatax/calc, et cetera.