Editor’s Note: Today we’ve got a guest post from Mark Faggiano at TaxJar. He’s going to talk about the Sales Tax issues facing Amazon sellers.
Dealing with sales tax can be tedious and bewildering for some online sellers, and the most frequent thing that we are asked about are sales tax due dates. Most states give you sales tax due date where you remit the sales tax that you collect.
Many of these dates vary and they can also change annually. For example, one state may only want to hear from you once per year at first, until they realize you make a large number of sales in their borders. Suddenly, they may want to hear from you once per month instead! You can also be required to file quarterly. “Quarterly” can also vary from state to state, with quarters made up of various months. Confused yet?
Also don’t forget that every state is different and when you sell on FBA or using other 3rd party fulfillment services, you may find yourself collecting and remitting sales tax to 15+ states.
Batten Down the Hatches for April’s Sales Tax Hurricane
As an online seller, you will probably have a sales tax filing due in April. Most states will require you to file a sales tax return even if you have no sales tax collection. Some will even impose a fine if you fail to file, even if you didn’t collect a cent of sales tax in that state over the taxable period! So be sure to file a zero return in states that require it.
We have put up an all-inclusive list of April sales tax due dates over at TaxJar, to help out with this issue.
Please take a moment to look through our list and don’t let late sales tax returns cost you more money!
Once you’re there, think about signing up for a 30-day free trial of TaxJar. We import your records from all the channels where you sell and combine it to get all of your info ready for each state. This way you can get back to your running your business instead of worrying about the sales tax perfect storm!
Mark Faggiano is the founder and CEO of TaxJar, a service built to make post-transaction sales tax compliance easier for multi-channel ecommerce sellers. Mark’s passion is solving complex problems for small businesses. He previously cofounded and led FileLater to become the web’s leading tax extension service for both businesses and individual taxpayers before being acquired in 2010.