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.