[bambax]

The vendor never has to "pay" any sales tax: they collect it (my initial wording was wrong).

It's the buyer who has to pay sales tax. Being French, if I buy anything anywhere in the world, I owe the French government 20% of the amount of that purchase; if I'm able to hide my purchase in my suitcase, then I'm evading taxes, but I'm certainly never exempt.

The crux of the matter is whether Amazon is an "out of state seller": is it? When an Illinois resident buys something from Amazon from the comfort of their own home in Illinois, they are not importing something from another state.

Amazon contends they are, though; they may have a case but I very much believe they will lose in the end.

[cgrand-net]

> if I buy anything anywhere in the world, I owe the French government 20% of the amount of that purchase; if I'm able to hide my purchase in my suitcase, then I'm evading taxes, but I'm certainly never exempt.

You are not evading the system, there is an exception:

http://www.douane.gouv.fr/page.asp?id=533

Sont exonérés de la TVA [...] les biens contenus dans les bagages personnels des voyageurs en provenance de pays extérieurs à l’Union européenne.

(Goods contained in personal luggages of travelers coming from a non-EU country are exempted from VAT.)

[Vivtek]

When an Illinois resident buys something from Amazon from the comfort of their own home in Illinois, they are not importing something from another state.

Yes, legally they are. That is exactly what they're doing. We don't call it imports simply because we have a federal law that prohibits any non-federal regulation of interstate trade (i.e., imports) and there is no such law beyond the boundaries of the United States, but there's a reason we're called the United States. In an important sense, we're 50 different countries that have delegated most of their law to a federation.

[repiret]

In the United States, the vendor always pays the sales tax. Its customary for the vendor to itemize it separately on their customer's bill and exclude it from listed prices, but its the vendor who has to write a check to the government, the vendor who has reporting obligations to the tax authorities, and the vendor who gets in trouble if it isn't paid. I suspect its the same in France, but I don't really know.

[bambax]

The vendor collects the sales tax from the customer, and then (a month later) reports it to the government and pays the government back; but the only sales taxes that a vendor owes are the ones it has collected (or, in case of a dispute with the govt, the ones it is assumed to have collected).

If for example a customer buys but does not pay, then the sales tax associated with that purchase is not owed.