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Do you want to put in your shipping address to every website before you can shop?
by drdec 2y ago
Do 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.