For many years, small online sellers operating from one location had only to look to their own state regulations to determine if they had to collect sales tax for in-state purchases. But now if they use fulfillment services, such as Amazon FBA, or use affiliates to help them advertise their products, they may have to collect sales tax for purchases made to out-of-state buyers.
A company that makes its living helping retailers manage sales tax collection, Avalara, has launched a new free tool specially designed for small sellers.
Unlike large chainstores that have locations around the country, most small sellers are not equipped to deal with the complexities of sales tax collection, which can be required not only at the state level, but the local level as well – Avalara says there are over 12,000 tax jurisdictions in the United States.
Avalara calls itself a “leading cloud-based sales tax and compliance automation technology provider.” It launched a free version of Avalara TrustFile, a new sales-tax reporting and filing solution for online sellers.
According to the announcement: “Whether starting up or managing the complexity of a growing ecommerce business, TrustFile helps ecommerce sellers and online small businesses quickly and accurately determine their sales tax filing requirements across the many thousands of tax jurisdictions in the United States.”
Online sellers can use TrustFile to determine whether or not they are collecting the right amount of sales tax in each individual state. The program also stores their records on the company’s servers (“in the cloud”). TrustFile supports Fullfilment by Amazon sellers with sales tax collection requirements based on Amazon’s business presence in states or municipalities where a seller’s customer may reside. Trustfile also supports PayPal.
More information is available on the TrustFile main website, and it has set up a community forum where it answers questions from users.
