Colorado Tax Law is an online sales killer!
We are forced to stop making online sales to Colorado residents out of our jurisdiction because the change in Colorado Tax Laws. Please read to find out why!
- Colorado changed their tax laws to require sellers to charge tax per county of the purchaser. In order for us to accommodate the new tax law we would have to:
A) File for a business retail sales tax license in every single county in Colorado - This costs $50 or more per county (filing fee and accountant fees)
B) Some Colorado counties even require that after we register we then must report taxes every single month, whether or not we made a sale
C) Pay our accountant to maintain the taxes owed to each Colorado county every month and file taxes for each sale in each county.
This makes future sales to Colorado residents impossible unless we charge consumers an additional fee for each online purchase to assist in covering the costs. This makes it hard to be competitive and would set us up for failure.
Why has Colorado changed these tax laws? (California is next in line)
- Amazon spent over $14 million on lobbying last year - their number 2 effort was regarding taxation, with USPS and Trade being other focuses of theirs. In this highly anti-capitalist move, Amazon is making it absolutely impossible for anyone else to ship directly to consumers. That means no more Etsy, no more small retailers, no more mailed access to any non-food products for residents of Colorado.
Why aren't other States doing this and why isn't it more prevalent in the news?
- We think that other States will start doing this as Amazon moves forward. We think that the reason that they didn't go after all states at once is because it would cause too much of an uproar. If they quietly get each state to change their tax laws then, potentially, too many dominos will have fallen by the time the public gets angry about it.
What can consumers do to help us (and every other small business)?
Contact regulatory representatives and complain. Here are the links:
Contact Jared Polis: http://coloradogovernor.migrate.acquia.com/governor/contact
Contact Cory Gardner: https://www.gardner.senate.gov/contact-cory/email-cory
It isn't just about us. If Amazon is the only online distributor that will be capable of affording to ship direct to consumers they will no longer have access to any small companies. We have looked into Shopify, Lightspeed, Avalara and TaxJar, none of which are small entities, and none of them can help. Therefore, if a company is selling on Etsy, or locally owned/operated/funded, or anything other than Amazon then it will no longer be available to Colorado residents unless we all start lodging complaints now.
There is a chance that there will be resolution for this in the future. However, from what Lightspeed and Avalara are telling us we don't have reason to believe this will occur for at least a year. Meanwhile, we are still able to sell to other states without this issue for now.
Please let us know if you have any comments, questions, considerations, etc.