Ebay Sales Tax Collection And Impact On Sales/Prices

I just paid 6% sales tax for an order from Germany. Which I thought was quite strange but I'm not familiar with the law in regards to international purchases.

As Don stated ebay has a whole floor with different departments to handle the SALES TAX question. You can be a sure ebay takes a cut ,as a processing charge to the States, and the departments and all the lawyers cost are factored into cost plus profit for ebay .

ebay sales download report now includes sales tax that they collected and sales tax I collected. I can finally see I own NYS sales tax for March, Apr and May and ebay takes over June 1.

The report is sorted by user ID so I can see the sales tax charged each buyer. It's in Excel so I could sort by state if I need it.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but I am seeing an uptick in HipStamp sales coinciding with ebay collected sales tax impacting buyers in more states.




The ebay report is in CSV format which can be imported into Excel, but without data types, and it only covers the most recent 90 days. Converting the report into a useable Excel file is a time-consuming process. Sellers who fail to download the reports regularly and save them may have to pay again if state tax authorities demand proof that ebay collected tax on their behalf. Providing useful information to sellers must not be a priority for ebay because reporting did not start until mid-April 2019, leaving Washington State sellers in the lurch for reporting from the beginning of the year.

It is my understanding that ebay has been slow to respond to tickets requesting fixes to their API. Capture and reporting of ebay Sales Tax Collected has been hit or miss in SixBit because the API does not successfully return amounts for combined orders. If the API worked correctly, it would be unnecessary to download ebay orders reports. The API bug was reported to ebay months ago, but it is still not fixed.

Any perceived uptick in Hipstamp sales vs. ebay presumably is temporary, as in all likelihood Hipstamp will also have to start collecting sales tax on behalf of their sellers at some point.

Does Hipstamp even have state sales tax reports?

I have not bought any stamps for 2 months,
Budget is going into savings when / if the market turns.
Shipping + Exchange Rate (Aussie 68c to the greenback)
makes it a folly to spend.
First time I have seen my dealer advertise for customers.

Money in the bank is earning a huge 0.15%

Australia post lost $190 million dollars last financial year, so stamps going up to $1.10 subject to approval.

HipStamp has a simple four column report with the Name, Type, Amount and Date going back a few years, showing sales and HipStamp monthly fee totals. I don't know if a more comprehensive report can be downloaded. I enter sales as they occur into SixBit. If sales increase, I would find a way to automate the import of sales into the SixBit database. I collect sales tax for Massachusetts on HipStamp, but in-state sales have been remarkably absent. I am not sure if SixBit has a way to enter sales tax on "over the counter" sales, but it would be possible to insert amounts into the database using SQL.

HipStamp may not reach the Wayfair threshold in some smaller states, but sooner or later some large state with aggressive tax collectors will come calling.

Wow, talk about messed up. Like the advertisement - "mayhem is everywhere."

It is incredibly complex.

Here in Australia our Government's efforts to claw back foregone tax revenue has seen some European marketplaces no longer ship to Australia - e.g. Catawiki. Shipping to Australia has just become too complex and too hard.