Comment on The FTC wants to ban hidden 'junk fees' that jack up the price of your purchases
cantrips@lemmy.world 11 months agoHow would a company advertise pricing across multiple states? E.g. on the web…
They could also just charge one price to everyone and then pay taxes after. I don’t think they have to pass the tax onto the customer like that.
Just charge everyone $10, note where they live, and when taxes are due figure out how much of everyone’s $10 needs to be paid to government
The same way most sites show it today, “Enter zip code:”
I’d rather see prices without tax, than have to enter my zip code before I can see any pricing for anything online.
And cities. Even some surprisingly small cities charge additional sales tax
floppade@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Use your ip address to estimate your location and use a sales tax api product like: www.avalara.com/us/en/…/avalara-api.html
Not an endorsement, just an example that companies already consider this.
elbrar@pawb.social 11 months ago
that would very much wreak havoc with caching since you basically can’t cache pricing including sales tax as it depends on your very specific location.
of course, for things like event tickets, it’s the venue’s location that matters for tax, so it works out to be a non-issue.
snowsuit2654@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Maybe you could do more localized caching. Localities with different sales tax are finite and few. Cache pages based on those localities and then serve pages based on the IP of the client. It’s not ideal or as optimal, but it’s not that unreasonable in my mind. If it became the norm we’d build the infrastructure to sustain it.
ericisshort@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Companies have no problem doing it to comply with EU regulations which require tax to be included, so I see no technical reason why they couldnt figure it out for the US.
floppade@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Fair, I admittedly don’t know how one would implement it, but the sales tax data is being used by their clients for something.
Looking into it further, some states, according to Shopify’s FAQ on the topic, have different rules with regards to destination-sourced vs origin-sourced sales. 🤷♂️
cantrips@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s an imperfect solution. VPNs are an issue - and even if you don’t use a VPN, the API only knows the location of the ISP’s servers - which can be in a different state.
My point was that, the law should leave tax inclusion in pricing as optional. There is no way to implement automatic detection cleanly, other than prompting the user to confirm their location, which is a huge annoyance - so the ‘tax inclusion’ rule would not make things better or more convenient.