Not sure why this sales tax issue for PWCC is continually being brought up. I thought that I read that Brent stated that the California Board of Equalization (which is the state tax board) has already audited PWCC and found them in compliance. I guess you could always say that they only audited this past year and not 2011. However, there is a paper trail for how much taxes a seller owes on ebay, so it would be too easy to be caught. Every invoice on ebay shows how much sales tax is owed on that item. The state tax board could just go to ebay (in addition to Paypal), and ask how much state tax this seller should have paid for that tax year. If the seller did not pay that amount (or more), then there would need to be significant explaining to do to the authorities. Therefore, it doesn't matter if the buyer does not pay the sales tax because as far as the state is concerned, somebody has to pay it (i.e., the seller). As long as the state receives every cent of the tax that is due, that is all they care about. Therefore, what I'm taking away from this is that PWCC believes that it saves the 3% from the Paypal fees, therefore it is willing to eat the 5+% extra. I agree that this is a significant amount, so not sure how they are able to do this, but I'm assuming they pay much lower ebay final value fees than regular sellers on ebay do. And obviously, PWCC has now moved to Oregon with no sales tax, so they don't need to worry about this for future sales. The one thing that I can think about on how to weasel your way out of this would be to adjust the ebay invoice to remove the sales tax if the buyer pays by check. This would be similar to how it would be done if the buyer had a reseller license for California. However, resellers need to fill out a reseller forms, which PWCC asked me to do in the past since I am in California and have a license. I would think that if the state saw that a high % of California buyers did not pay sales tax because the ebay invoice was adjusted to remove the sales tax, they would want to see the reseller forms at that point. The point here is that it's much too easy to be caught on this sales tax issue with little benefit. It would not be worth it for any seller to take this risk for just an incremental bid up, most especially a consignment seller.
Last edited by glchen; 06-19-2015 at 10:42 AM.
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06-19-2015, 10:37 AM
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