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I'm not sure if you're in the US, but sales tax here differs from other parts of the world. The buyer expects to pay sales tax as a separate line item. It is ad

I'm not sure if you're in the US, but sales tax here differs from other parts of the world. The buyer expects to pay sales tax as a separate line item. It is added to an order, rather than included in the price of an item, so this wouldn't have any effect on margins. You would have the additional overhead of tracking and collecting sales tax, however. That will have a negative effect on margins, but as an indirect operating expense rather than a direct cut from sales.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I'm in the US. By "in the soup", I mean responsible to compute and capture taxes from whatever members of the 9,000 jurisdictions that are applicable. The point here is that 1M in sales equates to only 100K in profits given very generous margins. Anybody selling physical product is going to be constrained under this law almost as soon as they move from a hobby to a very small ongoing online business concern. If your margins are only around 3-4%, it might not be worth the effort. You could end up with significant additional business expenses before you even get to the break-even point. There's a reason E-bay is against this and Amazon/WalMart is for it. This is a walled-garden giveaway. All the small fry will now have to find some walled garden to operate in -- or suck up a lot of extraneous regulatory crap that they probably can't deal with. A lot of tight-margin cottage businesses will not be able to hack it [insert long discussion about whether they should have known this going in, etc]
ams6110 14y ago
It will affect margins, because now you have the costs of this extra complexity in your accounting, or you have to pay a service provider to handle it for you.