[daniel_solano]

Well, this is a case of the State trying to milk every bit of sales tax revenue it can. Normally, if you have a presence in a state, you are responsible for collecting sales tax from your customer and sending it to the state.

Let's say that you have business where you put together and sell computers. If you worked out of Dallas and sold a computer to someone in Houston, you'd collect the tax and send it to the state. The state then keeps a portion and sends a portion to the local governments where you live.

Now, let's say that you move to some other state and sell a computer to someone in Houston. Normally, if you mail it directly to your customer, you do not collect any tax and it is up to your customer to pay a local use tax.

Amazon's problem is that it has a distribution centre in the Dallas area, and the state says that counts as a 'local presence', but Amazon does not agree.

To carry on with the example, you live out of state and you sell a computer to someone in Houston. However, instead of shipping it directly to the customer, your brother who visits every weekend picks up the computer, gets it to his home in Dallas, and then ships it out from there. The state finds out about this and decides that your brother counts as a "local presence". Accordingly, it then demands that you pay up on all of the taxes you have failed to collect.