Comment · Mon, July 29, 2019
Tax collected on shipping?
Original post in this thread
bob__cobb · 4 points
I noticed nootropicsdepot collects tax on shipping. I didn’t think Arizona law allowed tax to be collected on shipping when it is shown separately, which it is. Can somebody clarify this for me? Does this refer to only brick and mortar stores?
What they were answering
Direct reply to the original post — see the thread post above.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
We no longer just have to follow Arizona law, since the Supreme Court made that ruling last year. We now have to follow the state, county, and local laws of your municipality.
Many of the individual states now have passed nexus laws that affect what we have to do. Funny thing is, Arizona did not pass one. So I can still get things from online retailers without them charging me AZ sales tax. However, we have to follow the various laws of California, Ohio, Colorado, etc. if a customer is located there. Now us having "nexus" in a state is up to that state, and they all made their laws so strict that most people other than small individual Etsy sellers have nexus. It's a royal pain in the ass, as we have to fucking collect taxes for a ton of states, and some states require us to mail them fucking checks every month. Some of them require quarterly payments. Some of them require yearly payments. Every state's nexus law that was passed is different, though. So my finance director has to deal with this shit all the time now.
Just to be clear, we are not remitting sales tax to the state of Arizona unless you live in AZ. If you live in Colorado, we are collecting sales tax on behalf of Colorado (based on Colorado's laws), then remitting that tax to CO. Each state is different, so we have this automated system that calculates it based on your zip code. Some states, like Colorado, also make us collect city/municipality tax as well. The whole thing is a big mess, and the Supreme Court needs to get their shit together and think about the implications of things like this before they make rulings and overturn 40 years of precedent. If we want a nationwide sales tax system, the federal government needs to step up and control it. As it stands now, it is a clusterfuck that makes it possible for foreign-based companies to skirt the law and avoid the taxes we have to collect. It places undue burden on companies like us, because now we have to know 50 state's laws, and deal with all the dumb idiosyncrasies of each. I've never been to Idaho, or Montana, or Wyoming, but now I have to know their tax laws, and some consider us having nexus in their states even though we have no official dealing in them other than that is where some of our customers live.
So I would love to just not charge you sales tax at all, unless you live in AZ. However, we now have to thanks to the Supreme Court. We have to pay for a service that calculates it all called Avalara. That has all the laws and policies of the various states in there, and it calculates what we are now legally required to collect automatically. We do not set the tax manually. It would be impossible for us to create a manual tax table for how many different rules there are now. It sucks, but you can send your thanks to the dumbasses on the Supreme Court.