[blahblahblah]

Frankly, I wish Amazon would just give up the fight and go ahead and charge sales tax for all 50 states. They're the only retailer that I do any business with that doesn't charge sales tax and, because it's a PITA to remember to save every single receipt from them for tax purposes I don't do so and, therefore, I end up paying stupid use taxes which probably end up costing me more than what it would've cost me if Amazon had just collected the sales tax in the first place.

[kin]

How do you end up paying more in taxes? A majority of my spending this year was made on Amazon and in my tax return I didn't enter a single one of those purchases as "Out of State Untaxed Purchase" so I didn't get taxed, which I think was illegal but apparently I'm not the only one who neglects to do this. In any case, all Amazon receipts can be viewed in your account history.

[blahblahblah]

How do I end up paying more in taxes? Because I'm aware that I undoubtedly bought something from Amazon in the past fiscal year and, therefore, in compliance with my state's laws, I check "yes" in the box and pay the flat fee for use tax. That flat fee is set at a level that reflects what the state thinks an average taxpayer owes for their "out of state untaxed" purchases, but the "average" taxpayer in their model buys more stuff than what I would ever actually buy and, thus, they charge me more in use taxes than what it would have cost me if I had just been charged sales tax in the first place. I guess it just plain never occurred to me to look up my account history and compute an exact value instead.

[cschmidt]

That's what I do. Being the overly honest person that I am, I go through and total up all my Amazon purchases for the year. They should really have a way to compute the total automatically. It always takes me a while to do it by hand. But at least that way, you're paying the right amount.

[SamReidHughes]

Sales tax laws are different in all the different states. It's not like there's a lookup table matching state to tax rate. You've got different tax rates on different categories of goods, and different tax rates by county.

[r00fus]

Amazon does the web front for Target, and this is a solved problem (it is a PITA, but not intractable).

[protomyth]

It is only a solved problem for all the jurisdictions that have a Target. Sales taxes actually differ beyond the 50 states. For example, MN has a couple difference that cannot be found with 5 digit zip code. You need the whole address / zip+ and map data.

[DEinspanjer]

I would be rather unhappy if they started charging sales tax for all 50 states. Where would the money they charge me go since I live in New Hampshire?

[lsc]

yeah. I mostly avoid going through provantage.com for similar reasons. Keeping track of what I bought for use tax is a pain in the ass, and provantage does some ridiculous "ship it from CA to Oklahoma, then back to me in CA" scheme to allow me to evade sales tax. Well, i end up paying use tax anyhow, so it just costs me extra in shipping and bookkeeping costs.

[woobar]

Why do you need to save every receipt? Can't you just look up your order history on amazon.com?