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They should ban hidden taxes too. The sticker price should be the final price.
by guidedlight 2y ago
They should ban hidden taxes too. The sticker price should be the final price.
- drdec 2y agoDo you want to put in your shipping address to every website before you can shop?
- poorlyknit 2y agoA zipcode should be plenty and grocery websites do that already.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoThe zip code I live in spans two different cities (as well as different counties in my state). It's stupid but also it's reality
- kaonwarb 2y agoEven within a state a single 5-digit ZIP can have multiple tax rates if it spans multiple cities; true where I live.
- itake 2y agoUnfortunately, there are 13 zip codes that span across multiple states.
- mawif 2y agoThere are 41,000+ zip codes.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoAnd 13 of them do not uniquely identify which state you're in.
- runako 2y agoZIP codes are not specific enough. In some areas, sales tax is actual multiple taxes from different overlapping jurisdictions: state, county, city, and sometimes special tax district. ZIP codes don't align with any of these, so you need to know exactly where the buyer is in order to properly calculate sales tax. There are places where adjacent addresses in the same ZIP code have different sales tax rates.
- reaperducer 2y agoA zipcode should be plenty and grocery websites do that already. There's probably a Things Developers Believe About ZIP Codes list out there somewhere.
- munk-a 2y agoYea, that'd be pretty swell. The only reason websites moved away from that was to "lower friction" - it's better for the consumers who end up buying the product if they know availability and pricing up front.
- WillPostForFood 2y agoThe only reason websites moved away from that was to "lower friction" It was never the norm that websites never asked for your shipping address or zipcode before allowing shopping. That's really silly.
- munk-a 2y agoMy statement was overly general and that's a fair criticism - however I do remember e-commerce in the early days of the web. That early web experience for me was that generally users were required to make an account (mostly to verify age and ability to pay) before they could interact with items or create a shopping cart. In that era the interaction of sales taxes and the internet were much more complicated and shipping times and costs much more variable. I know that when my father was buying train books he'd often need to go to conventions in other states to pick up items in person because sellers were afraid of getting scammed out of their shipping fees.
- perfectstorm 2y agoa reverse IP lookup should give you a good estimate and you can always ask the user to enter their address for more accurate price.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoSurely this is outdated advice in the world of "Protect your privacy with NordVPN" all over youtube.
- briandear 2y agoNope. I hate when website use IP for anything, especially language selection. I travel all the time as well as use VPNs for work, and the idea that my IP represents anything other than what network I’m connecting from is just lazy UX.
- Symbiote 2y agoDo you often order things for delivery at home while you're travelling? Then the price will change when you provide the delivery address — just like it does now. Meanwhile, 99% of people will see the price they can expect to pay.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah, I see a lot of advice on here that websites should make some guesses and you can always correct them later if it turns out they're wrong. That seems like terrible advice. Oh, the price is $X. And once you've entered all your info "just kidding." I'd much rather know there are some things not included up-front if they're not reasonably factored in.
- alistairSH 2y agoYes let’s keep a shitty UX for most users because of a few abnormal users. Be honest, frequent travel and shopping over VPN is an edge case here. The vast majority of users are shopping and buying from home with a VPN. Or better yet, give municipalities an incentive to stop layering a kinds of taxes. Just have a VAT and be done with it.
- ghaff 2y agoAmazon in particular probably did a lot to normalize free (in country) shipping in many cases. But it's silly that there should be a sticker price that is the final price under all circumstances. Mind you, I'm all for more up-front transparency in general, especially to the degree that comparison-shopping is inconsistent to the degree it displays or doesn't display often significant add-ons.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aziaziazi 2y agoVery easy, we can get inspiration from the web shops 10 years ago (and still a majority of honest sites today) : the price of the item and somewhere close the base shipping price and a (legal minimum size) link "shipping price" redirecting to a shipping price table. We can even impose the table framework like the nutritional information on food to avoid volontary complexification of that page.
- potato3732842 2y agoAt which point they'll just segment the market based on zip code and once the ecommerce platforms and big sites start doing it it'll become the norm Good for me, my zipcode is the Walmart of zip codes. No so good for people who's zip code is the Whole Foods of zip codes.
- jopsen 2y agoWhen shopping physically that shouldn't be necessary. Should it? But I guess that would outside FTC jurisdiction? Most online shops have a good estimate of your location based on IP. And already use it to estimate shopping costs, right?
- indrora 2y agoI suspect the answer is instead to establish two tax rate calculations: One for in-person shopping (like VAT) -- you pay the tax according to local rates, but it's factored in already. one for online shopping, ("E-VAT") -- you pay a national rate tax and the seller is responsible for paying gross sales based on that percentage to the state and the rest goes to the IRS. Problem comes with the Sin Taxes that have been established. For instance, in Seattle, sugared drinks MAY incur a tax depending on what kind of store you bought it from (e.g. the normal costco has to tax it but the business costco doesn't), but that doesn't affect some folks and then there's tax-exempt organizations like churches that can have their sales tax waived and then there's states where sales taxes are a majority of the income is from sales tax but only if you're local and oh god it gets bad.
- marcosdumay 2y agoIt's funny, because when I buy from China, their stores have little trouble estimating my country's import tax, and my state's selling tax. But US physical stores can't manage to put the final price on their tags.
- connicpu 2y agoThe new rule does have clarification that they at least have to show you the final price with taxes+shipping before they're allowed to take your credit card. Those ones I get, because they can't be calculated without knowing your billing zip code.
- yoyoyo1122 2y ago> The sticker price should be the final price. God I wish this applied to buying cars as well
- kstrauser 2y agoIf you’re assertive enough, it is. “Oh, sorry, looks like we’d already applied the undercoat to your car.” “Ah, thanks!” “That’s an extra $400 charge.” “I’m not paying for it. I didn’t want it. You can have it back if you want.”
- syndicatedjelly 2y ago"Darn, sorry we can't make a deal. Hey look at all the people who need cars that are waiting!" This is not as much of an upper hand as you think it is, often these shenanigans happen after sitting at the dealer for a couple hours while they do whatever it is they do. Do you value your time so little that you'll just walk out of a transaction over less than a 1% difference in cost? The dealer knows how to play this game way better than you, if you walk into a dealership without having a plan to score a deal then you already lost
- kstrauser 2y agoYes, I have literally done exactly that thing and ended up with the dealer eating the price. The dealer has time and effort sunk into closing the deal, too, and they’ll almost always chose a bird in the hand. And also-freaking-lutely would I walk instead of eating a BS charge. Sometimes it really is the principle of the thing. My principle is I’m not paying a penny for something I didn’t ask for. A dealership I’d be caught dead doing business with will eat the bogus charges instead of losing a customer forever. Conversely, next time I need a Toyota, I have the business card of the guy I’ll buy it from and he doesn’t even know it yet. He treated me well last time and his investment in that deal will keep paying him back.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah. Last time I bought a car, at the last minute, it included "factory installed" extras that included a first aid kit for a car that wasn't built yet. I may or may not have actually walked (a couple of the options were actually useful) but I was "I'm not happy but I'll close the deal NOW if you add it to my trade-in" which they did.
- bradgessler 2y agoRules for thee but not for me.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI remember shopping in Japan. The price on the tag, is exactly what you pay (same with services, like hotels). Since this is Japan, it's a high price, but no surprises. Also, the service is amazing, and they won't accept tips. If you leave money on the table, they will chase after you, to give it back.
- belfalas 2y ago> Also, the service is amazing, and they won't accept tips. If you leave money on the table, they will chase after you, to give it back. I visited Japan some years back and loved this aspect of the culture as well. An Australian ski guide (this was a winter visit) explained it like so: "the Japanese attitude is to want to do a good job by default. Tipping implies that a good job is only done because of pay. The Japanese see quality service as intrinsically valuable in itself."
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI believe that servers are also paid quite well.
- spiderice 2y agoQuick Google search says the average is $7.55 USD/hour (1,159 Yen). Seems like they're paid quite poorly.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoMight be more to that story. Remember that Japan is a very socialized country, so CoL expenses are not what they are in the US. I have a friend that basically shops as part of her job. She has been power-shopping, mostly in Europe (dream job, I suppose), for decades. She tells me that she runs into the same sales associates, year after year, and has watched them “grow up” over years. So it seems to be possible, at least in Europe, for people to make lifelong careers in the service industry.
- crazygringo 2y agoIf you're talking about sales taxes, they can't until you input your shipping address. Because they depend on where you live. Nobody's trying to fool you by not including sales taxes. There's just no way to show them in advance, unless you want to start typing your address and zip code into every shopping website before you even browse.
- Symbiote 2y agoIn the EU, the site guesses the location based on the IP, writes "Delivery to Denmark [Change?]" and shows prices with Danish VAT. If I'm signed in to the shop from making a previous purchase, they will use the location of the previous purchase.
- qeternity 2y agoYes bc in the EU there is national VAT. In the US there is state and local sales tax. You can and will pay different sales tax between cities in a given state.
- emidln 2y agoYou can do this, albeit slightly less reliably, in the US as well. The geolocation isn't perfect, but you could easily put "With delivery to XXXXX [edit]" where XXXXX is a zip code you geolocate off an ip (or lookup in a user profile for a recurring user).
- kstrauser 2y agoThe zip code is not fine grained enough to identify tax jurisdictions in many places in the US.
- ssl-3 2y agoIf Denmark has just one sales tax rate or VAT, then maybe that can work OK for Denmark. But this isn't about Denmark -- it is about the US. In the US, there are over 13,000 different sales tax jurisdictions, and each one of them may have a different tax rate. I wish the best to anyone who would ever be tasked with sorting that out with any semblance of accuracy using IP geolocation databases.
- kaonwarb 2y agoThe one upside I’m aware of for taxes being added separately is high awareness of what the sales tax rate is.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago> sticker price is $112.59 > rings up as $121.41 > "Wow, I wasn't *highly aware* that the sales tax rate here where I live was 7.83%, thanks for helping me out by putting the wrong price on the sticker, shopkeep. Now I can calculate the actual price of things in your store, something I couldn't do before – I'll simply multiply every sticker price by 1.0783 in my head on the fly. What a great 'upside'!"
- petsfed 2y agoI'm more ok with "hidden" taxes, because the business is supposed to just hand that over. If they're putting something on the receipt that says "tax" and its not associated with an actual government-applied tax, that's just fraud., we don't need special rules to address that (yet). Its not hidden in an attempt to trick you into buying something at a higher cost. Its hidden because calculating the taxes requires additional information from the user.
- conductr 2y agoHidden and not yet calculated are different things. They should just make a broad and sweeping stances on these hidden fees. The fact they play whack-a-mole from implementing this from industry to industry as the 'need' arises seems silly. If a price is advertised or quoted, it should be inclusive all the things with tax being the one exception.
- rufus_foreman 2y agoYou don't know what the sticker price is going to be until you know who is buying it from where for what. Until then, all you can do is quote a price. Welcome to reality, kid. If you're buying it for resale, you don't owe tax. How do you put that on a price tag? There's use tax. Depending on what you use a product you buy for, you might owe a different tax rate. How do you get a final price out of that? You don't. When you quote a price, it's a quote.
- weberer 2y agoThey should just ban sales tax. Many states already have 0% sales tax, like New Hampshire, and Delaware.
- astura 2y agoNew Hampshire has no general sales tax; they still have a Room & Meals tax of 8.5% on prepared meals and lodging.
- skeletal88 2y agoIn this thread: people claiming how exceptional the US is, to justify not having the final amount on price tags. You guys can think of lots of reasons to justify why you can't do things like the rest of the civilized world does, be it prices and taxes, medical insurance or something else. The US is not some sprcial snowflake country.