Using the E-Commerce Internet .... Taxes Keep it simple!  You're going to get tired of hearing us say that but, we can't stress the point too much.  Your Internet store is not for you; It's for your customer. The latest word on Internet tax is that the moratorium will continue until some politician wakes up in a foul mood and decides that your government isn't charging enough for services. Actually there is a lot of confusion as to what taxes we're talking about. There are two possibilities: An Internet access excise tax and a state sales tax. The access tax would be like the Federal excise tax paid on your phone service. This was the initial impetus to the tax moratorium for the Internet. Somehow this idea carried over to questions as to whether sales taxes should be imposed on Internet sales. You don't have to worry about the excise tax. That'll be added to the bill from your Internet Service Provider and maybe even your hosting company. Our guess is that it's not going to break anyone. It's just another brick on the pile. Of more concern is whether to apply sales and/or VAT tax to sales made over the Internet and shipped to locations within your regional tax jurisdiction. Shipments outside of a jurisdiction have traditionally been excluded from applicable "state" taxes. A jurisdiction most often encompasses a state or Euro group but, can also include municipalities. Your specific jurisdiction is generally determined by the location where a sale is consummated. IE: Where you get the money. It can, however, include, as it is with large retailers, anywhere where you're licensed to do business. And that's just the tip of the tax quagmire iceberg. Certain items may carry different tax rates which can apply differently across any of the various jurisdictions. Add to all of this the European community where-in certain countries are contemplating some pretty stiff taxes on goods that can be delivered over the Internet. Including not just software but, items like music and videos. These tax rates will be determined by both the point of origin of the goods and the ultimate destination. In that respect the taxes resemble import taxes but they'll be applied to any downloaded product and could be in the range of 15% to 25%. OK, so where's the point of origin? Would it be the host server, the distributor location, the location of the company that develops the product, the artist's home? Who knows??? Why do we raise these issues? Because, the degree to which you concerned you are about item taxes will determine what kind storefront software you will need. Computing accurate zone sensitive sales taxes can be a daunting task for the storefront software provider. This means, if you want it done, expect to pay, sometimes dearly, for the service. Our admonition: Keep it simple. Yes, we provide MyStore3 storefronts that let you specify overall tax rates and item tax rates and will compute zone sensitive charges based on your state or VAT tax jurisdiction. However, our feeling is that for most small and home businesses, this isn't necessary. To that end we provide webPeddle and PeddleGold storefronts that don't compute any taxes. Here's our logic, assuming you should be paying a "state" tax in the first place. This is the Internet, you're a small business; most sales will ship outside of your tax jurisdiction. OK, you're in a large state so let's say 5% of your sales are in-state and the tax rate on most items is 6%. This means that three tenths of one percent of your overall sales volume is subject to a tax payment. That's a tax liability of $3.00 on every $1000.00 in sales. It's not worth the complication, aggravation, and cost of sophisticated storefront software to collect this from your customer. Just keep good records and pay the taxes out of pocket when due. Your state doesn't care if you collect the tax, just that you pay it. Next issue:  Shipping costs and how to ship Up-comming:  attracting and keeping customers, processing credit cards Further reading:  Selecting a Storefront  Products of ImagineNation!    Providing on-line stores for small and mid-size Internet businesses since 1996,   Imaginenation is a full service company meeting all of your e-commerce needs:    Storefronts     Credit Card Processing     Back Office Utilities     Merchant Accounts DO YOU NEED HELP WITH OUR PRODUCTS OR HAVE A GENERAL QUESTION? Please E-Mail specific product questions using the mail form at  ImagineNation.com For general information questions, visit our moderated public Q&A   FORUM Recent     Changes    Improvements    Upgrades Bar graphs were added to the IAMS and IFMS consoles for a quick comparison view of year to year, and month to month sales results. A printable shipping invoice with optional shipping and return labels was also added along with a new customer contact mail form. BakPak 2001 console users got a significant upgrade of the look and feel along with improvements in manual ordering and the recurrent billing utility. Have you seen our new PeddleGold storefront? This may be just what you're looking for!  webPeddleGold is a subscribed storefront application service. You host all store profile and product tables specific to your site and we provide the shopping cart code to make it all work. This means any fixes, improvements, upgrades, and new features happen immediately. You never have to worry about downloading and installing new files. And to make life even easier, webPeddleGold includes an on-line console where you manage your product tables and automatically transfer them to your own site. With PeddleGold you have the option to choosing a seamless interface to any of our back office utilities for order management, credit card processing, and much more. PeddleGold is the standard for a robust, easy to use, low cost storefront. Take a demo ride.       Check our low prices. Get your first month free. Tips 'n Tricks    HTML syntax shown here uses brackets [] instead of braces <> for proper rendering. Using webPeddle and PeddleGold storefronts, you can link to a product detail page from the description field in the database table and from the detail page link back to a list of related items in the database. This is an effective way of cross selling. For instance, you might have a ProdDetail folder for keeping all product detail pages. In the product table description field, link with [a href="ProdDetail/widget.htm"]more details[/a] . On the detail page link back with [a href="JavaScript:readdb('related widgets'); void(0);"]similar items[/a] . ImagineNation © 1996 - 2002 Suffering from overload?  List Removal E-ComTips is brought to you by ImagineNation because you are listed as a user of one of our storefront products or have subscribed to receive the Newsletter itself. To remove your address from our list, go to List Remove and, if your correct address and service ID are not showing when you get there, enter the correct values manually. Please do not reply to this newsletter return e-mail address. Replies here are not received. Use the Mail Form at ImagineNation to correspond.

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