[Yastrzemski Sports]

Originally Posted by Runscott

This is probably the wrong place for this, but a lot of us buy and sell as a partial business, so I'm sure it's on our minds.

...so I just got charged sales tax on an ebay purchase. I have a reseller certificate, as I run an antique business, and the item purchased is for re-sale.

Washington and Pennsylvania laws went into effect on January 1, 2019, requiring Amazon and ebay to charge sales tax. It's automatic - the seller doesn't have to calculate it, and the seller will be frequently surprised when their customer gets charged. My seller contacted me before I even knew about it - he actually seemed kind of scared as he had no idea what was going on.

The way I read this, is: if all 50 states passed such a law, as a seller ebay would automatically charge sales tax anytime I sell to any of the 50 states. Obviously each state is passing such laws so that they can collect more sales tax. So as a seller, I must report, according to each state's laws, any sales tax I collect from a buyer in that state, TO that state's taxing agency. That would be 50 separate quarterly tax returns (one for each state), possibly some annually, etc., depending on each state's laws.

As a reseller BUYING stuff, I'm just screwed, as it's up to me and the seller of re-sale items to deal with the certificate, and is Bubba in Southeast Ohio really going to want to deal with my reseller certificate?

Am I reading this correctly?

I’m no accountant, but since eBay is collecting and paying the sales tax automatically I don’t think we need to register with other states to collect the tax since it is being done by eBay. It almost seems that we are not the seller, eBay is.