Among opponents of the Marketplace Fairness Act, there is a sense that if they succeed in blocking the bill, online retailers won’t have to collect sales tax.
Not so.
First, online retailers already have to collect sales tax for any state where they have nexus, defined as a physical presence. Warehouses and offices definitely fit the requirement, but some states also require any retailer selling at a fair or convention to collect sales tax.
More importantly, states can pass their own online sales tax laws. While the Supreme Court’s ruling in Quill v. North Dakota says that states can only require retailers with nexus to collect sales tax, states have been pushing against the edges of that ruling for some time by redefining “nexus.”
Affiliate nexus laws have been perhaps states’ most popular tool. These laws redefine “nexus” to include any retailer with a marketing affiliate located in the state. New York famously used an affiliate nexus law to get Amazon to collect New York sales tax, and with the court’s March ruling that the law can stand, more and more states are following its lead—most recently Kansas and New Mexico. West Virginia has gone even further by saying that having an individual perform services or solicit business in the state also qualifies a retailer for nexus. What is meant by “services” and “solicit” has yet to be defined.
The use of a drop shipper can also trigger a requirement to collect sales tax. If a customer and drop shipper are located in the same state, sales tax must be collected on the purchase—no matter where the retailer is located.
States are hurting for funds, and they aren’t going to ignore the $11 billion in sales tax that a University of Tennessee study found is going uncollected. If federal legislation doesn’t pass, they will continue to enact their own laws, increasing the number of retailers with nexus in the state and who therefore must collect sales tax.
Unfortunately for retailers, that means a nationwide patchwork of sales tax laws to navigate, all with varying requirements and definitions.
The Marketplace Fairness Act, in contrast, requires states to simplify and standardize their sales tax rules, so it will be easier for a retailer to collect sales tax for multiple states. And with this legislation in place, states will have no reason to pass their own laws aimed at getting online retailers to collect sales tax.
Posted by FedTax 
The Marketplace Fairness Act has been all over the news in the last two weeks as it’s been debated on the Senate floor. The Senate is recessed for this week, but a vote on the bill is scheduled for Monday, May 6.
Let’s say an online retailer is selling 0.5-liter bottles of water in cases of 24. At $6 per case, $1 million is equal to 166,667 cases of bottled water, enough to fill 125 fifty-three-foot tractor-trailer trucks.* That means that if you were selling $1 million worth of bottled water in a year to out-of-state buyers, then you would shipping out an entire truck of full of bottled water approximately every three days.
Assuming the average price of shoes is $50 per pair, $1 million is equal to 20,000 pairs of shoes. To make $1 million selling shoes in one year to out-of-state buyers, you’d need to sell about 55 pairs of shoes per day, every day, for an entire year.
Many apps go for about $1 each, so to earn $1 million selling apps, you need to sell at least 1 million apps. To sell 1 million apps in a single year, you’d have to sell 2,739 per day to out-of-state buyers, or slightly less than 2 per minute, every minute, for an entire year.
*A 53-foot tractor-trailer has approximately 4,000 cubic feet of carrying capacity, with a maximum cargo weight of approximately 50,000 pounds.
In early December, we posted about 
