And yet somehow companies like WalMart and Target manage this terrific feat.
It'd be better if there were a unified system of national sales tax. But for a company Amazon's size, it's a laughable idea that it's somehow impossible to do this magnificent feat of implementing a lookup table.* The hard part is keeping things up to date, but a good faith effort to do the previous would get Amazon pretty far.
*I worked for a company that is a thousandth Amazon's size in revenues, but it managed to do it for the whole state of California. It genuinely can get complicated--zip codes can cross county lines, for instance--but again, far from impossible, and when this becomes widespread third party solutions will pop up a lot more.
I have no idea why you were downvoted. If the dudes running walmart.com can write code to figure out the appropriate sales tax for each item, the dudes at amazon.com should be able to as well.
Naturally, lots of people are pissed off at this turn of events. For good reason, too--everyone's losing here, including the State, Amazon, consumers, and various developers and start ups. Even the shadowy backers of the legislation (WalMart, Target, etc.) don't win an even playing field, because Amazon still isn't going to pay sales tax.
Since many people's livelihoods are very threatened by this frack-up, it's not too surprising that there'll be some itchy fingers.
It'd be better if there were a unified system of national sales tax. But for a company Amazon's size, it's a laughable idea that it's somehow impossible to do this magnificent feat of implementing a lookup table.* The hard part is keeping things up to date, but a good faith effort to do the previous would get Amazon pretty far.
*I worked for a company that is a thousandth Amazon's size in revenues, but it managed to do it for the whole state of California. It genuinely can get complicated--zip codes can cross county lines, for instance--but again, far from impossible, and when this becomes widespread third party solutions will pop up a lot more.