They should pay taxes solely because if they don't, we're going to lose much, much more retail than we already have lost. The tax system certainly isn't perfect, but the way it is now, it heavily favors online merchants over real, brick and mortar merchants.
Huh? How so? A customer walks into a store in NC and the price of an item is automatically 7.75% higher than if they bought the same product online. How is that level?
"2 addresses on the same street in the same zipcode may have completely different sales taxes, and you want each online vendor to have to figure that out?"
It's called a c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r. They're very good at keeping lists, doing repetitive tasks, and calculating arithmetic. Every online vendor IS already using computers. We're talking about a tiny tax table, no more than a few hundred lines. It's not rocket science. A pocket calculator could handle it. It's really nothing when compared to the burden we already bear taking care of other taxes.
"ere's a better idea. All the stores could add a note to their invoices that says what the state, city, and county use tax is for their zip code. This could be easily done via a computer lookup, leaves payment responsibility where it should be (the buyer), and notifies them how much they need to account for at the end of the year when they file their taxes."
That's 100% unenforceable, though. Just like the current "system".
"Consumers are already required to pay local sales tax on purchases made like this, most of them just don't. Instead of states requiring retailers to deal with this, why not enforce things as they are already, the individual's responsibility?"
And, how exactly, to you propose that a state would enforce this? It's purely an honor system. I don't know a single person that reports their online purchases.
This has nothing to do with the affiliates. The affiliates are paying income taxes. The states don't care about the affiliates. The states are trying to get Amazon to collect sales tax. Amazon is trying their best to avoid having to collect sales tax (and compete on a level playing field).
Most accounting software simply isn't set up for taxation in all 50 states, especially automatically.
No, but any accounting software could be altered in under an hour to do so. It's a tiny, tiny programming problem. Hell, most small business owners already pay a subcription service to keep their accounting software up to date with their own state's tax rates for employment.
I run a brick and mortar store AND an online store. No more than 5 minutes ago I was talking to a customer in the store, and she was asking what the sales tax was to see if she could buy the product cheaper online. That's ridiculous. People are short sighted and selfish. If this continues, we will have very little retail anywhere in the country in a few years, because everybody will be trying to avoid the sales tax. The gov't needs to close this huge loophole. Amazon needs to compete on a level playing field with other retailers. I know that I'd much rather add a bit of code to my web site to collect sales tax correctly all over the country than to have people avoid my brick and mortar store to try to shave a few pennies off elsewhere. I support online retailers having to collect sales tax.
Any small business owner with more than a few employees already buys a subscription service to maintain employee tax tables via Intuit. It would be a relatively minor burden.
"Do you have any idea what a nightmare it would be for a small online retailer if they had to figure out what sales tax to charge on every transaction in every locality in the country."
As an online AND brick and mortar retailer, I can imagine. It would be DIFFICULT! I mean, you'd have to have some sort of computer program that accessed a table, geez, maybe HUNDREDS of records large, and then report to the business owners where to pay the tax to! I mean, it would take a good, 5-10 minutes for somebody to program, and it would have to be updated every few months. Whoa! Talk about an inconvenience. That's a LOT more difficult than trying to run a brick-and-mortar store that pays significant amounts of taxes and having to compete against businesses that don't have to collect sales tax from their customers.
Please not this entire post was tongue in cheek. Except for this line. Oh, and the quote I was responding too... that was literal.
FTP back and forth, select the root and overwrite whatever's newer. Unless the time on the files gets screwed up, it works fine. Worst case scenario, which is the dates/times getting messed up, the FTP client downloads everything. No big deal. I do it daily for all kinds of files.
As older, wiser programmers than myself have always told me: KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Yes, Google is running scared, and they should be. My business' web site traffic has doubled from just two weeks ago. Google traffic is the same. Bing traffic is HUGE. I love Bing, and they are a serious contender.
While the OS they put on their retailer packages costs $100/seat, the POS POS from Intuit that they use now costs $1600/seat. My guess is they're re-negotiating with Intuit. The price of Windows is negligible, especially in this situation.
I agree. All of my business PC's come from thrift stores. My servers are all off-lease models, none of which I paid more than $400 for (RAID 5, redundant power supplies, dual NICs, etc.). Less bloated software = cheaper hardware.
If this means that they're going to offer bundles to retailers, I'd really be interested in seeing what POS software they decide to bundle. I've been looking for open source POS software for several years now, and there's really nothing out there for small to medium retailers out there that's even remotely competitive with stuff for Windows. If they can find something decent, they'll take a huge share of the retail market.
Just because somebody sends you a bill doesn't mean that you're contractually obligated to pay it. If they do something like arbitrarily changing the contract, and you want to exit it, there's nothing they can do (other than ding your credit score).
Eh. I get perfectly functional Pentium machines from my local thrift stores. They're usually $20/apiece. I don't understand the point in buying new PC's for anything these days.
To require this will result in extremely UNSAFE cars that no one wants to buy.
That's simply not true. Cars can be built better and smarter. Now they're just big and dumb. True, you may not be able to buy a Ford Exploder anymore, but most people didn't need those things, anyway. What makes driving unsafe is all of those crappy built, multi-ton monstrosities, and those will go the way of tailfins, anyway.
Then we might be talking about "2009: The Year of the Recession and Linux on the Desktop."
Based on the last decade of Linux adoption, I think it's pretty clear that most desktop users are willing to pay a hundred bucks or two for Windows. I know that certainly am.
I just had to wipe a laptop for my 5 year old neice. I considered Ubuntu as an experiment, but then I decided against it, because I didn't want to have to deal with the headaches. ie: Why doesn't xyz work?
You're probably right. It probably IS the credit cards. But as an e-commerce seller in the US, I'm going to tell you straight up: I do not and will not accept credit cards from outside of the US. Why? Rampant fraud. Until other countries deal with their fraud issues, there is no way that online merchants of any kind are going to accept credit cards from outside of the US. The risk is waaaay too high.
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They should pay taxes solely because if they don't, we're going to lose much, much more retail than we already have lost. The tax system certainly isn't perfect, but the way it is now, it heavily favors online merchants over real, brick and mortar merchants.
"I resent your implication that I fail to pay the use tax that I owe."
I'm not implying anything. I'm stating it.
"At present the playing field is level."
Huh? How so? A customer walks into a store in NC and the price of an item is automatically 7.75% higher than if they bought the same product online. How is that level?
"2 addresses on the same street in the same zipcode may have completely different sales taxes, and you want each online vendor to have to figure that out?"
It's called a c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r. They're very good at keeping lists, doing repetitive tasks, and calculating arithmetic. Every online vendor IS already using computers. We're talking about a tiny tax table, no more than a few hundred lines. It's not rocket science. A pocket calculator could handle it. It's really nothing when compared to the burden we already bear taking care of other taxes.
"ere's a better idea. All the stores could add a note to their invoices that says what the state, city, and county use tax is for their zip code. This could be easily done via a computer lookup, leaves payment responsibility where it should be (the buyer), and notifies them how much they need to account for at the end of the year when they file their taxes."
That's 100% unenforceable, though. Just like the current "system".
"Consumers are already required to pay local sales tax on purchases made like this, most of them just don't. Instead of states requiring retailers to deal with this, why not enforce things as they are already, the individual's responsibility?"
And, how exactly, to you propose that a state would enforce this? It's purely an honor system. I don't know a single person that reports their online purchases.
This has nothing to do with the affiliates. The affiliates are paying income taxes. The states don't care about the affiliates. The states are trying to get Amazon to collect sales tax. Amazon is trying their best to avoid having to collect sales tax (and compete on a level playing field).
Most accounting software simply isn't set up for taxation in all 50 states, especially automatically.
No, but any accounting software could be altered in under an hour to do so. It's a tiny, tiny programming problem. Hell, most small business owners already pay a subcription service to keep their accounting software up to date with their own state's tax rates for employment.
I run a brick and mortar store AND an online store. No more than 5 minutes ago I was talking to a customer in the store, and she was asking what the sales tax was to see if she could buy the product cheaper online. That's ridiculous. People are short sighted and selfish. If this continues, we will have very little retail anywhere in the country in a few years, because everybody will be trying to avoid the sales tax. The gov't needs to close this huge loophole. Amazon needs to compete on a level playing field with other retailers. I know that I'd much rather add a bit of code to my web site to collect sales tax correctly all over the country than to have people avoid my brick and mortar store to try to shave a few pennies off elsewhere. I support online retailers having to collect sales tax.
Any small business owner with more than a few employees already buys a subscription service to maintain employee tax tables via Intuit. It would be a relatively minor burden.
"Do you have any idea what a nightmare it would be for a small online retailer if they had to figure out what sales tax to charge on every transaction in every locality in the country."
As an online AND brick and mortar retailer, I can imagine. It would be DIFFICULT! I mean, you'd have to have some sort of computer program that accessed a table, geez, maybe HUNDREDS of records large, and then report to the business owners where to pay the tax to! I mean, it would take a good, 5-10 minutes for somebody to program, and it would have to be updated every few months. Whoa! Talk about an inconvenience.
That's a LOT more difficult than trying to run a brick-and-mortar store that pays significant amounts of taxes and having to compete against businesses that don't have to collect sales tax from their customers.
Please not this entire post was tongue in cheek. Except for this line. Oh, and the quote I was responding too... that was literal.
FTP back and forth, select the root and overwrite whatever's newer. Unless the time on the files gets screwed up, it works fine. Worst case scenario, which is the dates/times getting messed up, the FTP client downloads everything. No big deal. I do it daily for all kinds of files.
As older, wiser programmers than myself have always told me: KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Yes, Google is running scared, and they should be. My business' web site traffic has doubled from just two weeks ago. Google traffic is the same. Bing traffic is HUGE. I love Bing, and they are a serious contender.
While the OS they put on their retailer packages costs $100/seat, the POS POS from Intuit that they use now costs $1600/seat. My guess is they're re-negotiating with Intuit. The price of Windows is negligible, especially in this situation.
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/us/segments/bsd/point-of-sale-accounting?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
I agree. All of my business PC's come from thrift stores. My servers are all off-lease models, none of which I paid more than $400 for (RAID 5, redundant power supplies, dual NICs, etc.). Less bloated software = cheaper hardware.
If this means that they're going to offer bundles to retailers, I'd really be interested in seeing what POS software they decide to bundle. I've been looking for open source POS software for several years now, and there's really nothing out there for small to medium retailers out there that's even remotely competitive with stuff for Windows. If they can find something decent, they'll take a huge share of the retail market.
Just because somebody sends you a bill doesn't mean that you're contractually obligated to pay it. If they do something like arbitrarily changing the contract, and you want to exit it, there's nothing they can do (other than ding your credit score).
Eh. I get perfectly functional Pentium machines from my local thrift stores. They're usually $20/apiece. I don't understand the point in buying new PC's for anything these days.
To require this will result in extremely UNSAFE cars that no one wants to buy.
That's simply not true. Cars can be built better and smarter. Now they're just big and dumb. True, you may not be able to buy a Ford Exploder anymore, but most people didn't need those things, anyway. What makes driving unsafe is all of those crappy built, multi-ton monstrosities, and those will go the way of tailfins, anyway.
Then we might be talking about "2009: The Year of the Recession and Linux on the Desktop."
Based on the last decade of Linux adoption, I think it's pretty clear that most desktop users are willing to pay a hundred bucks or two for Windows. I know that certainly am.
I had to buy the new Office for home because those who upgraded never remember to downgrade.
Ooops. You could've just downloaded a free MS reader/converter from Microsoft. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/HA010449811033.aspx
Business-wise, this is the opposite. Now is not the time to take IT risks.
I just had to wipe a laptop for my 5 year old neice. I considered Ubuntu as an experiment, but then I decided against it, because I didn't want to have to deal with the headaches. ie: Why doesn't xyz work?
She got XP.
What about plans to deal with credit card fraud risk from inside the US?
You do the best you can. But from my experience, the fraud rate from inside the US is several orders of magnitudes better than outside of the country.
You're probably right. It probably IS the credit cards. But as an e-commerce seller in the US, I'm going to tell you straight up: I do not and will not accept credit cards from outside of the US. Why? Rampant fraud. Until other countries deal with their fraud issues, there is no way that online merchants of any kind are going to accept credit cards from outside of the US. The risk is waaaay too high.