[ballenf]

I think you've got it kind of backwards. The absence of tax collection is what allowed Amazon to become Amazon and this change is now a barrier to a new entity challenging Amazon.

Amazon voluntarily started collecting taxes nationwide without a blip to its bottom line.

The new law will in fact put Amazon's first-party goods in parity with 3rd party sales. Third party sellers could often undercut Amazon's own pricing due to the disparity.

This tax change is a huge win for Amazon on many fronts. Any protests they make to the contrary are strategic, imo.

[jjeaff]

It's a win for a part of Amazon's business, the part that stocks and sells its own products and is already collecting taxes. It's a loss for the other, larger side that gets paid to stock and ship products from 3rd parties who by and large do not collect tax.

This makes it tougher for these small businesses to compete and since Amazon takes 15% of those sales AND makes money off them for fulfillment services.

[pishpash]

Perhaps. It could also incentive a new round of internationally based direct-to-consumer dropshippers to take e-commerce to the next logical level, now taking advantage of the differential in international sales tax regimes. Aliexpress is an example.

[smallnamespace]

All this would do is create an opportunity for a SaaS startup or existing payments provider to offer collecting the correct amount of tax for you.

I personally worked on this sort of problem for a large company; most of the work is in figuring out what the business logic ought to be; turning it into code is (largely) trivial.

Figuring out the logic only needs to be done once, and the payments provider is the natural place for it to live.

[SyneRyder]

Indeed, several already do this - Fastspring, Paddle, and there are services like Taxamo (although I'm not sure if Taxamo actually remit the tax on your behalf, or are just an API to calculate what your obligations are).

[riknos314]

It could actually be a huge win for Amazon's third party sellers as well, as services such as FBA could handle the tax collection on behalf of the third parties. It just adds to the value that Amazon can provide in its services for sellers.

[Eliezer]

The stock market disagrees with you.