
EBay recruits users in push against sales tax legislation - jkopelman
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/21/us-ebay-salestax-idUSBRE93K05K20130421
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larrys
"The legislation includes an exemption for merchants that generate less than
$1 million in annual out-of-state revenue."

Tying things to a dollar amount doesn't make much sense in any case.

1 million in sales of electronics (with low margins) is not the same as 1
million in sales of hand knitted sweaters (or pick your example).

What we will see is an entire middle layer develop to help "small" merchants
deal with the complexity of collecting sales tax that will inevitably take a
cut of the action and add an additional tax.

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Jach
I'd love it if Jeff Bezos sent out an email to all Amazon customers responding
to this one.

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rubbingalcohol
If eBay wants me to lobby on their behalf, they should pay me.

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anigbrowl
That's rich coming from a company that charges 13% commission on sales (10%
flat final value fee if you don't rent a 'store' by the month, plus 2.9%
Paypal transfer fee, plus sundry other minor fees like the fixed 30c per
paypal transaction, insertion fees etc.).

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analog
Absolutely. Ebay's policy has been to steadily increase fees until they reach
a point where too many sellers quit.

The net effect on sellers will be zero in the long term. They will either pay
a sales tax or they will pay Ebay's increased fees.

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larrys
"until they reach a point"

With no real competition that's more or less standard operating procedure
(price/demand curve?) in many businesses until the customer says "uncle".

By the way sellers (I'm sure you realize this and just made a mistake) of
course don't pay sales tax buyers do of course even if sellers paid it would
be passed along to buyers.

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wtvanhest
I'm not really strong in micro, but it seems logical that all 3 parties would
pay some share, with the highest share being paid by the seller through
reduced demand.

Also, has anyone created a sales tax management company? That seems like it
would reduce the burden significantly on small businesses.

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cjy
You are right. Whether buyers, sellers, or eBay pay the tax is a function of
the price sensitivity (elasticity) of the varying group. See:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence> This is a little different from
the standard model because eBay is a third party.

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d23
Seriously? Anything less than $1 million is already exempt, and they're still
complaining?

I've been happy not paying sales tax on Amazon for years now, but when I heard
there would be a law forcing them to collect, I didn't freak out. We had a
good run of having to pay nothing. I didn't expect it to last forever.

Do people really want to avoid putting money back into the country at every
turn? This is still America, and it's still great to live here. Taxes let it
stay that way. Sure, we may not always like what they're being spent on, but
that's a necessary part of being a citizen.

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dangrossman
If you have a 3% gross margin and a million a year in revenue, you don't have
enough money to hire even a single full time employee. Who is going to handle
the new requirement to integrate 50 different software packages this bill
requires the states make available to compute sales tax at purchase time, to
fill out 50 sales tax forms every quarter/year, to cut and keep track of 50
checks...

A $1M/year seller could easily spend their entire year's profit just paying
someone to keep track of which of the states have opted in to the new programs
this bill will create, research the sales tax laws and forms in those states,
research their software/APIs, build the integrations, etc.

If a federal sales tax law simply meant cutting one check and sending one
spreadsheet to some authority that then divvies out the payments to the
appropriate governments, that'd be something else. I don't think that's been
proposed.

~~~
d23
I guess I assumed it would be handled through ebay's payment system. If not, I
could see how that would be a pain. Still, that's only 50 checks a year.
Doesn't seem _that_ difficult.

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dangrossman
What about everyone that sells online and doesn't do it through eBay?

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askimto
You go out of business because your margin was razor thin. Obviously.

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dangrossman
[deleted: don't feed trolls]

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askimto
If that's the only argument then I hope it passes. Why should some minuscule
number of small businesses hold everything up?

