Online commerce jungle - Part 1 - Sales Tax-Speedymac

Online commerce jungle - Part 1 - Sales Tax

For more than a year a project has rolled around in the back of my mind. It is a simple online commerce tool with a deeply pragmatic attitude.

A little over 2 weeks ago, the last pieces fell into place mentally, so I dedicated some precious weekend time to working on it.

The results are nearing completion, but I wanted to post some thoughts on the fundamental pieces of online commerce.

Today, Sale Tax, or how I learned to give up.

The internet knows no boundaries, well except for the great firewall of China, and possibly some middle eastern countries.

Yet, in this century, why is there not a publicly available web service that provides the sale tax calculations for businesses?

Not, some fee-based for-pofit business that charges small businesses prior to them ever making a single sale.

But, the online equivalent to the sale tax charts handed out by every tax authority.

If governments wants businesses to charge sales tax online, they need to modernize their processes and keep up with online commerce.

The same can be said of shipping companies, but that is another post.

1 George // May 20, 2007 at 01:36 PM

Most states have a flat sales tax -- any ecommerce software can handle that. The wost sales tax mess is in New York state where each county has it's own sales tax rate. To make matters worse, in some areas, one side of the street may be in a different county than the other; and, the zip codes don't match up with the counties at all. Additioally, when filing the quarterly sales tax report, you have to indicate from which counties the sales tax came from. I was actually able to write a PHP module that correctly handled this NY sales tax madness (with a few exceptions).
2 Lon // May 24, 2007 at 06:06 AM

George - Thanks for the comment. Yeah. It is not overly burdensome, well until you have to deal with the EU and VAT. I still wish there was a web server at say the IRS that you could just ping for the update-to-date tax rate for a transaction.