Overstock Cuts Off NY Affiliates Over NY's Amazon Sales Tax Law
from the nice-work,-New-York dept
Last month we wrote about how New York was changing a law to try to force Amazon to collect and pay sales tax in New York by defining any affiliate in the state as being an Amazon point of presence. This is a clear perversion of the intention of the law that only requires collecting sales tax if the company has a physical presence in the state. While Amazon is now fighting this law in court, others are taking more drastic measures. E-commerce site Overstock.com has declared that it will no longer allow New York affiliates in order to avoid having the state consider it to have a "physical presence" there. This would be an unintended consequence of such a law. In an effort to get e-commerce providers to cough up more in taxes, not only will Overstock not be paying those taxes, it just made life a lot more difficult for thousands of Overstock affiliates in New York.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: affiliates, new york, sales tax
Companies: amazon, overstock
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States think they can unfairly bilk people on sales taxes like this and that it will reward them in the end. The truth is that people will simply stop buying things and they'll dick the economy over in the long run.
Right now, I buy everything I can over the internet. I use Amazon's premier service (I buy a LOT of stuff from them - probably $15k per year just from Amazon alone).
If I had to start paying taxes on everything I bought? I would simply stop buying things. Period. I would wait until I visited my home town of Portland Oregon and buy everything tax free and in person.
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Re: +infinity
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Re:
Bad news for you: you have to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax
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Money Swirls Around the Economy
Taken to the extreme, these affiliates spend their income in the state, and now other NY businesses will have reduced revenue, so those businesses and their employees will also pay less income tax to the state.
End result: the state will STILL collect no sales tax on Overstock purchases, but they also cut their income tax receipts as well.
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Re: New Florida?
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I moved out of New York in large part due to the dysfunctional nature of the state government.
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Overstock vs New York
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Same here
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Outside a couple decent online camera shops, NY seems to be filled with a lot of online grey market scammers and bait and switchers.
Loosing (see what I did there?) NY affiliates might actually be a positive thing.
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EXACTLY how youa re supposed to do it
Now if only people would do that to the music/movie companies represented by the RIAA/MPAA...
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Now its Amazon's turn
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Another angle to this law
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Change Address
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike
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OVERSTOCK SAYS NY STATE IS BACKING DOWN
http://seekingalpha.com/article/85766-overstock-com-inc-q2-2008-earnings-call-transcrip t?page=-1&find=new+york
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NEW DEVELOPMENT! NY MAY REPEAL THIS TAX LAW!
http://seekingalpha.com/article/86766-amazon-overstock-gamble-may-pay-off
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Amazon vs. the States
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