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Amazon Charges Sales Tax On "Shipping and Handling"

Posted by timothy on from the not-just-shipping-mind-you dept.

You may have noticed that retailers like Amazon are charging tax, in compliance with state laws, on not just the price of goods, but on the "shipping and handling" fees they charge. An anonymous reader writes "By coincidence I noticed this myself the other night, and ended up ordering something from a supplier in Arizona, rather than Amazon, to avoid the sales tax. Now here is an article about it in the Los Angeles Times."

7 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Buy Amazon Prime. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Problem solved.

    1. Re:Buy Amazon Prime. by Prosthetic_Lips · · Score: 5, Informative

      False. The sales tax laws are very specifically worded, anything collected (even if in excess of what you were supposed to collect) is required to go to the states. Unless the rules are different since Amazon is out-of-state? I have looked into Florida laws, and even if I were to collect double what I was supposed to, I couldn't keep a penny (legally).

    2. Re:Buy Amazon Prime. by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I work in order to have time for leisure. In all seriousness, if you took the time I spent relaxing after work and made me work a second job? I'd prefer to be dead. That's not life, that's slavery.

      --
      Everything will be taken away from you.
    3. Re:Buy Amazon Prime. by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The existence of Prime shipping is a game-changer to someone who lives in a place that gets hurricanes, because it enables you to buy things with overnight or 2-day shipping that would be cost-prohibitive to buy from them if you had to actually pay full price for that shipping. I don't even bother fighting the zoo at Home Depot, Target, or Sam's Club anymore before hurricanes... I just buy everything from Amazon, and come home from work to a pile of hurricane supplies waiting on my front doorstep the next day, a few hours before the hurricane makes landfall. Prime shipping is the whole reason why I now buy things like cat food, batteries, and lawnmower parts from Amazon, as opposed to books. Even places that offer free shipping can't compete, because THEY only offer free GROUND shipping, and if you want it upgraded to 2-day or next-day, you get hit with the full cost. With Amazon, 2-day is free, and overnight is only a few dollars more.

      I just wish Amazon had a search option for "Only show me items that can be shipped in time to receive tomorrow". If there's any consistent logic to their cutoff times for same-day shipping, I have yet to figure out what it is. Sometimes it seems to be as late as 8:30pm, sometimes it seems to be 4pm, and it doesn't just seem to vary by warehouse... it literally seems to be a matter of blind, random good or bad luck that changes daily with no apparent rhyme or reason. Saturday and Sunday delivery are even more randomly variable. Few things are more frustrating than trying to do last-minute birthday present shopping on Friday as the deadlines are ticking away, and you can't even figure out what the deadlines ARE without clicking on the item and scrolling down. I swear to god, I'm going to write a program to do brute-force scraped-searches on Amazon called "OnlyTomorrow" that spoofs a browser, executes your search, then fetches the items and brute-force eliminates any that can't ship in time or that don't literally include the requested keywords in the title/description (my other pet peeve about Amazon... sometimes, its signal-to-noise ratio for searches is just horrendous, and the SNR seems to be the absolute WORST when you're panic-buying and desperately trying to beat the same-day shipping deadline).

  2. Outrage! by White+Flame · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After all the outrage in the Apple tax thread, everyone should stand for paying their fair share of sales taxes, not dodging them by ordering out of state from somebody they normally wouldn't.

  3. Re:sales tax is always on the FULL PRICE by PPH · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And now you see why small businesses don't like to have to collect taxes for hundreds of different taxing jurisdictions. When they aren't located there, are much smaller than Amazon and can't afford a tax compliance department staffed with accountants and lawyers. Yeah sure, you could do business as a 'associate' of Amazon and have them handle tax compliance for you. But now you're their bitch and they can dictate other aspects of your online existence.

    Wave good by to innovation.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  4. Re:Is shipping by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mostly because Slashot's green color is lead paint, and all these screen lickers are getting lead poisoning.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.