CSLA .NET Version 2.1 Handbook Purchase Question for Rocky

RangerGuy posted on Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Hi Rocky,

I just tried to purchace the new e-book but it's charging me tax. I don't think that it should be charging tax for Canadian orders.

RockfordLhotka replied on Wednesday, February 07, 2007

All I can do is relay what my tax advisor tells me, which is to collect sales tax.

To do this, so as not to inflate the price of the book, I took my end price: US$24.95 and backed the tax into it (and the processing fee from PayPal too).

In other words, you'd pay $24.95 with or without tax - that's the price I wanted to charge as a total fee. Any tax that I end up actually paying comes out of that net amount.

I agree with you, I don't see why I'd have to collect/pay sales tax for non-US (or even non-Minnesota) purchases. I'm researching that myself now to find out for sure.

But regardless, the price is $24.95, and any tax or fees I have to pay out of that is something I'm handling. Perhaps it would be simpler if I turned off the tax processing in the store. That way any tax handling would become invisible to anyone purchasing the book.

(Originally I did the thing as $24.95 with inclusive tax, but that caused a lot of confusion. People (including me) aren't used to seeing a price shown with inclusive tax, and it was quite odd and led to a number of confused emails coming my way.)

Hopefully this helps make everything more clear.

ajj3085 replied on Wednesday, February 07, 2007

RangerGuy:

I just tried to purchace the new e-book but it's charging me tax. I don't think that it should be charging tax for Canadian orders.

Tell that to the state.  They certainly believe you should pay the tax, just as if you drove there and bought the book.

That's actually the feeling of most states in the US (right or wrong as their belief may be).  Remember, we don't have a federal level sales tax, so any sales tax is up to the state.  My state of Vermont expects me to figure out and report tax on purchase I made out of state which I did not pay sales tax for (this is a Usage tax).. and that was before the internet even came into play.

So the sales tax thing here is very confusing, even for us... mainly because states want to claim tax on a purchase you made in another state, which IMO is out of their jurisdiction.

RangerGuy replied on Thursday, February 08, 2007

Yeh that is strange.... I was just figuring that when I order something online from a store it never mentions tax. I order from mostly larger stores so I guess they have the resources in thier accounting departments to take care of it LOL!

No worries Rocky I thought maybe it was just a bug in the software.. I'm ordering it today :)