The Supreme Court announced a decision yesterday signifying that the free ride for not paying sales taxes on buying items on the internet from out-of-state is now over.
Going back to a case many years ago (Quill vs. South Dakota), it had been that if your company did not have a presence, meaning store of office in a particular state, they did not need to charge sales taxes to residents of that state. The Supreme Court has now said this is no longer the case.
It remains to be seen how this will affect internet shopping and affiliate marketing in the near term. State will have the benefit of collecting more sales taxes and stocks of major internet retailers dropped yesterday implying the market feels that possibly sales will decline a bit online due to the lack of tax savings.
Another major factor is now all businesses must have to track sales taxes and figure out how to remit them to hundreds if not thousands of government tax collection entities… sounds like fun! (not).