Business 2.0 is reporting today that a movement to require sales tax on all online orders is in the planning stages and legislation could hit Washington by next month.
This is bad news for online consumers, as well as small internet merchants. Online retailers without an IT staff could have a hard time writing systems in the checkout process to calculate sales tax for all 50 states. For online retailers with downloadable goods, it might not be as simple. This is one topic to watch. The sales tax issue has come up before and not been acted upon, but the revenue sales tax could generate is hard to ignore, especially with the growth of ecommerce over the last 5 years.
