Talking online merchants and sales tax on the CAM Blog Podcast
May 28, 2008 Affiliate Industry News, Uncategorized
I’m excited to announce that tomorrow (5/29) I am going to have the chance to sit down with John Marshall of EpiscopalBookstore.com to chat about the growing trend of states requiring online retailers to collect sales tax from shoppers. Coming July 1, 2008, this will be required of all online resellers in Washington State.
Taxation of online retailers has become a lightening rod issue with recent legal action pitting Amazon against the State of New York - with New York asserting that Amazon’s use of affiliates operating in New York (where Amazon has no offices, warehouses, etc) constitutes “Nexus” or effectively a corporate presence in state. New York argues that this entitles them to charge sales tax on Amazon transactions despite the fact that Amazon is Seattle WA based. For more coverage of this issue, I recommend following the story on the 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blog - Linda Buquet has done an awesome job of info gathering on this.
This case has caused many merchants to react (over react) and fire all of their New York based affiliates to insulate themselves from this potential issue, and affiliates that are New York based to look into incorporating and doing business from New Jersey to exempt themselves from being dropped by merchants and networks fearful of a heavy tax bill.
I’ll speak with John on the Washington specific issues (this is messy) as well as what he knows about the nationwide movement of states to aggressively pursue sales tax from online retailers. Washington is a particular mess for this as many counties and towns/cities, etc also attach their own fractions of percentages points to the state sales tax to finance projects and the state appears to be basing the sales tax that needs to be gathered on the location of the buyer.
My conversation is at noon PT and I will try to have this edited and up by 3:00 pm PT
Tags: affiliate marketing and taxation, online marketing tax issues, state sales tax and online retailers
