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Or perhaps the playing field will be tilted even further in Amazon's favor. Collecting taxes is difficult. There are hundreds of thousands of variables depending on where you are currently standing and what you are buying. Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts of Disney World.

There's a space for a service that manages that burden for you. The service might already exist and is probably called 'Amazon Fulfillment'.




There sure seem to be a lot of sales tax calculation service and software companies already, aside from Amazon:

https://www.capterra.com/sales-tax-software/

A lot of them are revealed by googling 'sales and use tax software'

I think that sort of software solution has been around for about 20 years.


Oh, no doubt. I helped to support that software twenty years ago. It was expensive. It took constant grooming from an entire team of people. At the end of the month, the company had to cut hundreds of checks to authorities all over the country. For a Fortune 500 company, this is a normal cost of doing business. But this is not the kind of thing you want to subject small business owners to.

We only had to go through this mess two decades ago because we had nexus sites at all our warehouses. Before Mayfair, the mom-and-pop internet seller could get by with only taxing their local customers.

The Mayfair result is going to force difficult and expensive sales tax compliance onto the backs of small business. Your small business owner doesn't want to go shopping for 'sales and use tax software'. They want the shopping cart to do that work for them.

Unless the states actually get together to come up with a simplified and unified system, companies like Amazon who can abstract all that away are are going to be a necessity. I think a nation-wide internet sales tax is better than forcing additional burden onto small business or driving them right into the arms of places like Amazon.


> Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts of Disney World.

Whoa, what? This sounds interesting--do you have a link you could share?


"Most of the Walt Disney World Resort is in Orange County, Florida which has a tax rate of 6.5% while the most southern Resort hotels and venues are in Osceola County, Florida which has a 7.0% tax rate." [1]

See also: [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=taxes%20in%20disneyworld [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...




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