Slashdot Mirror

U.S. states can now require online retailers to collect local sales taxes, according to a recent Supreme Court ruling that could affect thousands of third-party sellers on top tech sites. An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: In fact, Amazon, which last year started collecting sales tax in all 45 states that require it by law, may have a substantial amount of work to do to help its Amazon Marketplace sellers stay compliant. Yet we don't know if that burden will fall primarily on Amazon or if it will be the responsibility of the sellers. More than 50 percent of all sales on the site are conducted via third-party sellers, some of which use Amazon for fulfillment but otherwise operate independent small- to medium-sized businesses... Etsy, eBay, and others are in similar boats. According to the US Government Accountability Office, as much as $13 billion in annual sales tax revenue is at stake....

Etsy is concerned about what it sees as "significant complexities in the thousands of state and local sales tax laws" and that by overruling the Quill decision, the Supreme Court has put the ball in Congress' court. "We believe there is now a call to action for Congress to create a simple, fair federal solution for micro-businesses," Silverman added.
The Verge writes that "the case may be litigated for years to come to figure out how to account for the over 10,000 state jurisdictions that govern sales tax across the country. That is, unless congressional legislation supersedes the state court decisions... Even groups that were in favor of the ruling, like the nonpartisan research institute the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, are imploring Congress to act."

eBay has already mass-emailed many of their users urging them to sign an online petition "to protect entrepreneurs, artisans and small businesses from potentially devastating Internet sales tax legislation." The petition presses state governors, U.S. lawmakers, and president Trump to "support the millions of small businesses and consumers across the country."

Keep reading to see what eBay is urging legislators to do...

• Keep the Internet as free from government taxation and regulation as possible.

• Protect entrepreneurs, small businesses and artisans from new taxes, audits or collection burdens because they can least afford the added costs.

• Continue to prohibit states and localities from applying and enforcing sales and use tax laws on small, remote local businesses who have no political or voting connection to the taxing state.

• Reject tax policies that raise prices on consumers who shop online with small businesses for artisan, craft, religious, vintage or other niche products because they should not be paying more taxes.

Do you agree with the Supreme Court -- or with the tech companies who want a new federal solution?

Leave your thoughts in the comments...

Etsy is saying goodbye to CEO Chad Dickerson and CTO John Allspaw, and hello to former Skype and Evite CEO Josh Silverman and VP of Engineering Mike Brittain. "The Board decided that it was time for new leadership to take Etsy forward and I support that decision," Dickerson said in the announcement, later adding, "I have the greatest degree of confidence in the long-term growth opportunities for Etsy under Josh's leadership." The press release also outlined plans to "eliminate approximately 80 positions, which is approximately 8% of the total workforce." TechCrunch reports: Dickerson (as well as Allspaw) will remain at Etsy in an advisory role until the end of May. He first joined the craft marketplace as CTO in 2008, then became CEO three years later -- he held the role when Etsy went public in 2015. He'll also be stepping down as chair of the company's board of directors, with Fred Wilson taking his place. When it went public, Etsy stock was initially priced at $16 per share and rose to nearly $35 on the first day of trading, but it was down at $11.39 per share at market close today. Hedge fund Black-and-White Capital LP is urging the company to explore strategic alternatives, including a possible sale.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from U.S. News and World Report: An army of reddit users believes it has found evidence that former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta solicited free advice regarding Clinton's private email server from users of the popular web forum. A collaborative investigation showed a reddit user with the username stonetear requested help in relation to retaining and purging email messages after 60 days, and requested advice on how to remove a "VERY VIP" individual's email address from archived content. The requests match neatly with publicly known dates related to Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. Stonetear has deleted the posts, but before doing so, the pages were archived by other individuals. "ARCHIVE EVERYTHING YOU CAN!!!!" a person wrote on a popular thread on the Donald Trump-supporting subreddit r/The_Donald, as the entries disappeared. There are several reasons to believe the reddit user is indeed Combetta, who was granted immunity by the Justice Department during its investigation of Clinton's private server after he deleted a large number of emails. The evidence connecting Combetta to the account is circumstantial, but also voluminous. The inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com, a search of domain registration information using the service whois.com indicates. An account for a person named Paul Combetta on the web bazaar Etsy also has the username stonetear. And, perhaps most damningly, there are the dates. Stonetear posted to reddit on July 24, 2014: "Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don't want the VIP's email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out..." U.S. News and World Reports adds: "On July 23, 2014, the House Select Committee on Benghazi had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of records, according to an FBI report released earlier this month on the bureau's probe of her email use." Stonetear submitted an additional post to reddit on Dec. 10, 2014 that reads: "Hello- I have a client who wants to push out a 60 day email retention policy for certain users. However, they also want these users to have a 'Save Folder' in their Exchange folder list where the users can drop items that they want to hang onto longer than the 60 day window. All email in any other folder in the mailbox should purge anything older than 60 days (should not apply to calendar or contact items of course). How would I go about this? Some combination of retention and managed folder policy?"

UPDATE 9/19/2016: Slashdot reader NotInHere points out that there is a Slashdot user named "StoneTear" as well.

"The United States Postal Service "Click-N-Ship" site suffered no outages or slowdowns during Christmas rush," writes Bennett Haselton. "It just has bugs that make the process more annoying than just standing in line at the post office, which defeats the purpose. The most frustrating part is that most of these bugs could have been fixed, just by having some testers run through the ordering process and make a note of anything that seems confusing or wrong. (Although I've included notes on how to work around all the bugs, so you really can print your own labels and skip the line.)" Read on for the rest; what other gripes do you have about the current package delivery regime, and how would you resolve them? This suggestion on the LifeProTips subreddit reminded me that I'd been meaning to try printing my own USPS mailing labels to skip the lines at the post office. I'd been putting it off because I knew that I'd be determined to find the most efficient way of doing everything through the site, and if the site didn't steer me towards exactly the best options, I'd end up forcing myself to reverse-engineer their whole algorithm in order to find the most efficient way myself. That's why I always appreciate it when a website just tells me the best option instead of making me second-guess them.

Right away, the USPS website failed that test because it does not allow you to print first-class mail labels, instead steering you towards the more expensive Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express options. Online users have complained about the lack of first-class-mail options on USPS.com for years, and users on several forums suggested using the PayPal Ship Now site instead, which does let you print first class mailing labels online, along with Priority Mail labels other options.

In my case it was a moot point because I had to use the Priority Mail labels in order for my packages to arrive by Christmas, but the deception was still hugely aggravating. Not just because of the thought of millions of people wasting money (and the finite resources of the postal system) due to the USPS site tricking them into a more expensive upgrade that they didn't need. But because it now meant I'd have to second-guess every recommendation they made, wondering if they were steering me toward something that was worse for me and better for them. The reason sites like Amazon are so stress-free to use is because, for the most part, they do display the options that are best for you, even at the expense of their own short-term profit. Some third-party merchant is selling a book for less than Amazon's list price? They'll let the seller list the book right on their site and undercut Amazon's own sales. The benefit to the user is not just the cost savings, but knowing that you don't have to feel like a chump for not wasting time on search engines trying to find a cheaper deal.

Once I realized the USPS site was concealing the cheaper options, in my determination to avoid getting ripped off by the USPS I almost ended up getting ripped off much worse by one of their "partners". I remembered an ad on a Google search mentioning Stamps.com, so I signed up for an account there and downloaded their software, which does in fact let you print first-class postage. It was only after reading a warning in the original subreddit that I realized I had unwittingly "agreed" to a $15.99/month charge. It turns out that the Stamps.com registration page says above the credit card form that your card info is "required to purchase postage", but this is misleading -- the fine print in the sidebar says you will be charged $15.99 per month if you don't cancel. (And neither the software nor the website gives you a link to cancel -- you have to call their customer service number.) Fortunately, I did call and cancel after realizing I'd been duped, but I was not surprised to learn on Wikipedia that the company had been the subject of over 1,000 Better Business Bureau complaints from users regarding the unauthorized monthly charges. (The part on Wikipedia about "long hold times" is out of date, though -- the automated prompts recognized my account by my phone number and let me cancel without any waiting.)

What does that have to do with USPS.com? Because it never would have happened if the USPS website had been on my side in the first place, giving me all the mailing options that I actually needed. It's bad enough when a private company does this, but the USPS works for us, don't they?

So that's not a "bug" in the traditional sense, but I'm counting it: #1: Not giving users all the mailing options they want to know about.

Most of the other bugs are not self-serving tricks; rather, they're just unclear directions where you have to pause and puzzle out what you're really supposed to do, which is different from what the site tells you to do. For example:

#2: Listing boxes as shipping options that don't fit the dimensions that you've already entered

On the label printing page (requires a USPS.com login if you don't have one) is the option to enter package dimensions. If you specify package details of 1 lbs and 13x5x6 inches, and click to calculate "available Services and Prices" based on the details you've entered, you're presented with a list of options that include 'Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope 12-1/2" x 9-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Small Flat Rate Box 5-3/8" x 8-5/8" x 1-5/8"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 11" x 8-1/2" x 5-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 13-5/8" x 11-7/8" x 3-3/8"', and 'Priority Mail Padded Flat Rate Envelope 9-1/2" x 12-1/2"' -- all of which, of course, are too small to hold the package whose dimensions you just specified.

You could argue that it's the user's responsibility to make sure their package fits into the box they select, but a user could reasonably assume that the whole point of entering the length, width and height is so that the USPS can recommend only those boxes that will hold the item. Remember, the user usually doesn't have these boxes in front of them at the time they're printing the label. They could end up selecting a box option, printing the label, taking it all the way to the post office along with their package, only to find out that the package doesn't fit into the box that they printed the label for, and that they have to wait in line anwyay to pay for an alternate method.

It's a middle-school-level programming exercise to take the length, width, and height of a package as an input, take as a second input a list of boxes of varying lengths, widths, heights, and costs, and find the lowest-cost box that will hold the package (keeping in mind that the package can be rotated to different orientations so that the "height" becomes the "width", etc.). It's reasonable to expect the postal service to be able to do this too.

#3: Everything wrong with the "print your labels" page

Here's a screen grab of the "print your labels" page that appears after you've paid, which you can use to play the Highlights "What's Wrong?" game:

• The text at the top says "You'll have until 11:59 PM CST of the Ship Date to print these labels." OK, but if I print them at 11:59 PM, what good does it do if the post office closed at 6? Are the labels only valid on the ship date, or will they still work if I take them to the post office the next day? This should be more clear.

• Text says "A SCAN Form must be printed when taking packages to the Post Office." Fine, but there's a checkbox next to that sentence. If that sentence describes a postal regulation, what does it mean if I un-check the box? That the regulation no longer applies to me? Can someone tell me if the drug laws work that way as well?

• The next sentence says: "Close out and print your SCAN Form here." I have no idea what that sentence means. Close out of the browser? And where is "here"? When it's not hyperlinked, "here" means here.

• WHY IS THE "PRINT LABELS" BUTTON DISABLED?? I have the checkboxes checked for both labels. I want to print them. What else do you want me to DO? (My PC has a printer, which the Chrome browser is aware of -- it lets me print from other webpages with no problem.) I got it to work by saving the PDF and printing that, but I never figured out why the Print button was just sitting there, mocking me from behind its veil of grey.

• The "Schedule a Pickup" button at the bottom -- same problem as the "print until 11:59 PM" message at the top. Since I printed these labels with the ship date specified as today, it should be more clear if the labels will still be considered valid tomorrow, which is the soonest time that a pickup could be scheduled.

#4: Over an hour on hold and never got through.

As an adherent to the touchingly quaint notion that a reporter should talk to the subjects of their story before running it, and also because I just wanted clarification on some of these questions, I called the USPS help line and waited on hold for 30 minutes before their help line disconnected me. I called back and waited for another 40 minutes before I hung up this time. OK, strictly speaking that's not a "bug". They just suck.

In the end, after reverse-engineering their pricing options as I had vowed to do, I determined what appeared to be their rules, (applies only to domestic Priority Mail), which you may find handy:

• If you're shipping in a Flat Rate box, the weight of the package doesn't matter (up to the 70 lb limit), only the dimensions, to the extent that they determine which Flat Rate box you can fit it into, with the bigger ones being more expensive.
• On the other hand, if you pick the Priority Mail "Use your own box" option, then the dimensions don't matter (unless you exceed the allowed limits), only the weight -- a 5 lb, 3"x3"x3" package and a 5 lb, 21"x21"x21" package both ship for $15.22, but if you change the weight, that's when the price changes. (If you try to ship a 22"x22"x22" package, you get an error that you've exceeded the dimensions for a Click-N-Ship.)

Using this, I was able to strategically break my one shipment, which would have cost about $30, into two separate shipments which cost $12 and $8. All told, with the effort to reverse-engineer their pricing options and to document all of the bugs for posterity, it took me about an hour to figure out that $10 savings and to print labels that I could take to the post office and skip the line -- which, it turned out, looked only about 3 minutes long -- in order to experience what one redditor described as "feeling the hate from the people standing in line as I casually stroll up and drop my packages off at the front desk". But the important thing is, I did it efficiently.

Lucas123 writes "Researchers using a RepRap open source 3D printer found that the average household could save as much as $2,000 annually and recoup the cost of the printer in under a year by printing out common household items. The Michigan Technical University (MTU) research group printed just 20 items and used 'conservative' numbers to find that the average homeowner could print common products, such as shower rings or smartphone cases, for far less money than purchasing them online at discount Websites, such as Google Shopper. 'It cost us about $18 to print all [20] items... the lowest retail cost we could find for the same items online was $312 and the highest was $1,943,' said Joshua Pearce, an associate professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at MTU. 'The unavoidable conclusion from this study is that the RepRap [3D printers] is an economically attractive investment for the average U.S. household already.'"

samazon writes "Online retail shop Etsy announced a living-expenses grant program for women interested in attending the free Hacker School 3-month programming course. The program is hosted in various New York locations (NYU and Spotify have both hosted sessions) and not only is Etsy offering $5,000 grants to ten women who are accepted into the program, they're also hosting the summer course, and have offered enough space to double the class size to 40 students."