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Originally Posted by tschock
First, not disagreeing with anything you are saying. But the other thing to keep in mind is who has the deep pockets. Not you or I, but eBay. While the burden at this time might be on the seller, it might not be in the future. There's a fine line that could be blurred or shifted if there's easier money to be made collected. Auction houses collect taxes, though they are a consignor and don't actually 'own' the goods they 'sell'. Who's to say that burden might not be put on 'marketplaces' in the future. I'm not arguing with what the law currently is here, but speculating as to what it could become.
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Understand exactly what you are saying but, this is the fine line that Ebay is trying to straddle. Whereas an auction house runs an auction on behalf of their consignors who sign an agreement with them to basically act as an agent on the consignor's behalf, Ebay does no such thing, and does not ever take possession of the items being sold on its site, nor become responsible for the shipment of goods and receipt of the payment. in fact, it is because of these latest occurrences that Ebay may have been looking ahead to these types of sales tax law changes that prompted them to make the decision to spin-off and divest themselves of Paypal a few years ago, so they could not be considered as responsible for collecting monies directly from buyers and make it less likely they could ultimately be held responsible for collecting sales tax.
Not sure it is a completely accurate analogy but, Ebay is like the flea market operator who rents spaces to sellers who come to sell their stuff to an audience that shows up because they know all these sellers are going to be there. The flea market operator is not the owner of the goods, does not deliver the goods or collect the money for them, does not act as an agent for the sellers, and definitely is not responsible for any sales taxes.
If the flea market gets big enough that someone at the state level knows about it, they could send an agent down to check on the sellers to see if they are properly collecting sales tax, etc. Now the flea market owner may not be responsible for the sales tax themselves but, say he/she does collect addresses and other info on all the sellers who show up so, the state agent makes a "friendly" request that the flea market operator provide all the pertinent seller info so the state can check up on the sellers. Once word of that gets out, how soon do you think it would be for sellers to stop going to that flea market so they don't get looked at by the state? This is how Ebay could take a hit and another reason why they were likely putting out that petition they were asking all the sellers to sign a couple months or so ago, fighting this recent ruling. Ebay is probably figuring that even if they don't have to directly do anything with this new sales tax enforcement, they still get hit with it because they are so big and already have so much information on everyone that the taxing authorities could simply request all the data and scare away sellers who don't want to get reported to the government.
To use another, maybe poor, analogy, think of the sellers as cockroaches. What do they do when you enter a room they're in and turn on the lights!!!