I see this as a positive for Shopify. We work very closely with the platform, and over the years I have only seen a handful of direct-from-Chinese dropshipping sites that actually produce any revenue. Sure there are a lot of accounts that are opening with the hopes of a get-rich-quick scheme with low cost and risk.
I am certain that it is the legitimate businesses that are behind Shopify's success, and this will help with their reputation and give them a chance to focus their marketing on the right customers.
Check out Shopify's marketplace for selling online businesses [0]. I limited the search to dropshipping. Dozen's of businesses with five figure monthly revenue and a few with more than that. Revenue data comes directly from Shopify and can't be edited by the seller. These are just the businesses for sale. I would call this more than a handful.
Look, Shopify is a great product and long-term I only see it growing. That being said, I would think the loss of Chinese dropshipping would hurt it's short term outlook.
A while back when Yahoo released inactive email addresses, I grabbed moore@yahoo.com. It was a nightmare. The account would receive 10,000+ emails a day. The inbox was full of insurance claims, social security numbers, mortgage applications, pay stubs, and more. In the end, I deleted the account since I didn't want the possible liability of the account.
The support for this has been there on Shopify for quite some time. With a tool like https://www.taxjar.com/ I was able to easily pay all the state, county and city taxes in a few minutes for my wife's small online shop.
Still, tested correctness is different from guaranteed correctness. Either the taxation is unambiguously defined in law (howver scattered within the law) or it is not and we have void for vagueness.
The people who define the taxation are payed by taxes, so why not require the deliverable to include a cryptographically signed algorithm? Then all the shops can have free peace of mind:
What is likely to happen is Congress will finally pass the Marketplace Fairness Act which requires states to comply with the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement before they can collect the sales tax. 23 states already fully comply with the agreement.
As part of the agreement those entities without a physical presence in the state pay only a single state agency all sales tax and not have to pay tax to individual localities within the state. For each state the type of products subject to tax and the rates of tax on them are uniform across the state.
The states are also required to make available free of charge databases with boundaries and the tax rate on goods within each boundary. States must not hold any businesses liable for the under or over collection of taxes based upon any errors in their database. In addition the Streamlined Sales Tax Board of Governors certifies service providers. If a busines uses a certified service provider they are not liable for under or over collection of taxes based upon an error by the service provider. There are currently 7 certified providers. The certified service providers provide data regarding what taxes need to be collected on a transaction, will collect the tax on behalf of the business and submit it to the state on behalf of the business. Many e-commerce platforms already integrate with one or more CSPs. I imagine those that don't today will quickly do so or if large enough become a CSP themselves.
Thankfully with Shopify it is extremely easy and straightforward to manage for my wife's small online store. Their platform does a great job properly charging taxes by state, county and city in certain situations. Then using an inexpensive plan from https://www.taxjar.com/ the entire filing and paying process is 100% automated.
In 10 minutes I was able to file and pay all the sales taxes to several state, dozens of California counties and a handful of cities that charge additional taxes on top.
This assumes these mom and pop shops have heard of these services. Personally I was helping someone get their little internet store off the ground and it was a huge hassle even with woocommerce.
If they accept credit cards online, their credit card solution ought to include tax management feature.
Usually, small shops can ignore stuff like this until they get a bill from an authority, or get big enough for it to matter. As long as they save money for estimated tax liability (approximately equal to their local tax rate), they are fine.
And what would it look like if Mom & Pop were starting an ice-cream shop instead of an online storefront? Would they _not_ have to pay tax then?
I get that being subject to regulation or taxation is more burdensome than not being subject to it, of course that's the case. But it does not follow that requiring sellers to pay sales tax is unduly burdensome.
If the underlying complication of tax is the problem, fix that.
> And what would it look like if Mom & Pop were starting an ice-cream shop instead of an online storefront? Would they _not_ have to pay tax then?
They would only have to pay sales tax in one tax jurisdiction, the one in which they are physically based and in which they can vote to change those taxes.
> But it does not follow that requiring sellers to pay sales tax is unduly burdensome.
What follows is requiring sellers to track and remit sales tax in some 10,000 jurisdictions is burdensome.
With a brick-and-mortar storefront, they have to figure out one jurisdiction's salestax (rate and what is taxable), their own. That is quite literally orders of magnitude simpler than this.
How do you handle knowing what items are taxable vs non-taxable for each item and taxing district? How do you handle customers who are tax-exempt? How do you handle tax holidays and reduced tax on school items in August?
How much do you end up having to pay for TaxJar? It looked to me like the monthly plan was cheap but you'd get totally hosed if you tried to use them to auto-file all the taxes. Are you filing yourself?
So you assume. As a small business you are unlikely to be audited, but that software could easily be wrong creating a huge minefield and potential liability.
So that would be the software companies' liability. And such business practice can differentiate good ones from the bad ones. I'm seeing a new business market here even.
There is zero economic gain from more complex tax rules. Further, the software does not absolve you of liability. At best they may agree to cover it, but that's unlikely and they can also go broke if they get it wrong.
Actually, current sales tax software provided by South Dakota and other states does absolve a merchant for liability if used to calculate sales tax due.
Actually, the federal government should oblige each member state to provide the algorithm, and sign it cryptographically and have it expire every X fixed time interval, and have signed algorithms for the current and next time interval, so that software can automatically fetch and stay up to date.
Then the "business opportunity" of navigating FUD evaporates. Currently any such enterprise charging for such a service can spend a fraction of their budget lobbying against harmonization...
Since it would be an obligation of the states to the federal government, these algorithms (provided by each member state) should be hosted on a fixed federal government site.
This would reduce costs of tax collection for all parties.
What is the most convenient format for this layered geographic data? Are the tax district boundary polygons already otherwise available as open data?
What do localities call these? Sales tax tables, sales tax database, machine-readable flat files in an open format with a common schema?
How much tax revenue should it cost to provide such a service on a national level?
States, Counties, Cities, 'Tax Zones'(?) could be required to host tax.state.us.gov or similar with something like Project Open Data JSONLD /data.json that could be aggregated and shared by a server with a URL registry, a task queue service, and a CDN service.
While the Bitcoin tax payments bill passed the Senate and House in Arizona, it was vetoed in May 2018. Seminole County in Florida now allows tax payment with crytocurrencies such as Bitcoin:
> According to a press release, the county will begin accepting Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to pay for services, including property taxes, driver license and ID card fees, as well as tags and titles. The Seminole County Tax Collector will reportedly employ blockchain payments company BitPay, which will allow the county to receive settlement the next business day directly to its bank account in US dollars.
This could also help reduce the costs of tax collection and possibly increase the likelihood of compliance with the forthcoming tax bills!
these are all very good questions, and only a community discussion of people with the right skills and interests can draft a petition, if enough people contribute to the discussion we can make the proposal more reasonable and robust against valid criticisms... but I believe we can make this happen by just starting the discussion. We can bitch on Hacker News, or we can draft a proposal for the different government levels. The more reasonable we draft it, the higher the probability the petition will be a success. I think it wouldn't be hard to argue against this proposal that a legally enforced computation should be open source, i.e. not just the algorithm for the computation but also all the data lists and boundary polygons used in the algorithm...
>here’s zero national economic gain from _any_ variation in law from state to state
Yes there is. States compete with each other and this prevents any one of them from having laws that are much crappier and more oppressive than average because when that happens businesses and people leave.
So competition might prevent one of many downsides to different states having different laws? I don't see why this means there's any benefit to that situation over just having one set of laws?
The model [1] GP alludes to claims that competition forces small governments to provide better (more efficient, more optimally chosen, etc) local services than monopoly governments, for the same reasons that competitive companies are expected to provide better services at a lower price.
I think you are conflating several different types of liability here.
If: i)your accountant messes up due to negligence or worse, ii) you get audited, and iii) it turns out you owe far more than you thought, then you are liable to the Govt for the extra amount owed. The accountant may be liable to you for professional negligence, damages etc. Your damages against the accountant are not the extra amount owed (because it is what you should have paid in the first place), but losses caused by the mistake. In the above scenario, the Gov't may assess a "penalty" and/or "fee" for late payment of taxes, but those fees are usually waived and/or extremely nominal. In the above-scenario, criminal liability simply does not happen. The above is not legal advice.
I can relate to this video. In the mid-2000s I worked as an art director at 2Advanced creating over the top Flash sites. We had a client who insisted that we add a red, invisible hexagon shield on top of the animation to prevent "forces" from attacking the site.
Here are my current favorite IFTTT recipes for my phone:
Screenshots to Dropbox - Add my iPhone screenshots to a Dropbox folder
Post Instagram pictures
Voicemail to Soundcloud - Leave a voicemail for IFTTT and post it to Soundcloud as a private track
Siri to Evernote - Create a Reminder list "Evernote". Use Siri to add a new reminder to the "Evernote" list. Append the reminder as a note to an Evernote notebook.
I primarily used Safari on the Mac for development and browsing up until Safari 6. After they crippled the web inspector by removing key features and adding the confusing design and layout I switched completely over to Chrome for browsing and dev.
I'll certainly give it another shot, but it'll be hard to give up Chrome as the primary browser.
As one of the first 100 on the Behance platform, I think this is a fantastic acquisition for both sides. When a large corporation acquires a company you love there is often concern, but seeing how the Adobe + Typekit relationship played out I'm expecting great things.
I think they have a pretty solid plan. They understand ecosystems, such as why they developed multiple types of desktop software to cater to different needs in/for the creative community.
It transitioned people to using the same suite of products, which I think is huge for the creative industry at large; particularly with making it easier to transfer files from person to person for collaboration, delivery, etc.. Remember when some designers used Photoshop, some Fireworks, and some Corel Draw?
Having a calorie count on the menu is helpful. The state of California started requiring this a few years ago and it has influenced what I order.
As an example, before the calorie count I would occasionally go for a tuna sandwich at Subway. I knew that the sandwich wasn't a healthy choice, but after seeing 1,000+ calories next to it on the menu I stopped ordering it. When you see items on the menu in the 1,000+ range and others half of that for the same portion it should influence your chooses.
I am certain that it is the legitimate businesses that are behind Shopify's success, and this will help with their reputation and give them a chance to focus their marketing on the right customers.