|
Also, the way the law was written for affiliates, the person doing the purchasing didn't pay the tax, the affiliate did (who cares if it was more than they actually were paid). Otherwise, when you placed an order, you would have random amounts of sales tax charged, depending on the last link you clicked. If they just required charging of their states tax (and no local tax - that gets into nearly impossible for mail order places, due to crazy tax laws) for sales delivered to that state due to one or more affiliates being located in the state, Amazon might cave (especially since most other places get caught on this). It does put them in a position where mail order catalog come out ahead again (specifically exempted from this type of end-run at the federal level). Trying to track the sales based on the state where the affilate is located isn't difficult (they do it now), but collecting taxes on it would be a killer, either for the affiliates or on the customer (who would find a way to click someone from a state w/ no sales tax).
|