Taxes on online shopping will HELP small business.

[Aaron]

[John Galt]

it's nothing but a positive aside from the fact it's wholly negative

by deceasing the amount of extra money you have to spend on things, you spend less money on things. those that suffer the most would be those with the highest prices, so big box stores like walmart and big online retailers like amazon will be alright, but then there is less leftovers for the rest.

amazon already helped small businesses. you could buy from small businesses through amazon. i really don't see how this is positive in any light, other than perhaps, increased government revenue

[The Dude]

[exploited]

You know, this thread made me miss Dylan and Saz. They would have come in here and talked about how small businesses needed to be eradicated and replaced with corporate economies of scale.

[uebermann]

Small businesses honestly have no one to blame but themselves. They aren't losing out to tax issues, they are losing out because the cost of their products is so damn high compared to online. I'll still shop online 99% of the time because I simply refuse to pay $60 for a f**k HDMI cable at the local shops. One of them has them for $25 and I have used them in a pinch but honestly, they can't expect to hold up to the competition unless they either start price matching or putting reasonable prices on products.

Small businesses need to understand that they can't just arbitrarily put whatever price they want on a product. I mostly buy computer hardware so the only examples I have is from that but the prices aren't even close. Taxes will NOT make a difference in my shopping (online) habits. At all.

Maybe if the prices get closer, I'll go back to local but not before that.

[John Galt]

the only things it could "destroy" would be things that you paid less in shipping than you did in taxes, which would mean high priced, low weight items. so name them

that is, of course, if the only difference was sales tax, and not like, something else such as, oh i dunno, cost of the item?

as for the "avoiding" tax thing, the transaction took place in another state, and you were not physically there.

[uebermann]

The other problem with the local stores is selection. They typically have a much smaller selection than online stores. Say I need a video card with HDMI out but I want a cheap one. Well the cheapest one the store has is like $80 as opposed to ones I can get online for $30-50.

Here's a good comparison:

http://www.cpu4u.com/product_info.php?c ... ts_id=2370

their price? $65 plus tax

Newegg? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121439

$40 plus shipping

Even with shipping and tax its going to be like $20 cheaper to buy online.

[Winchester]

[eynon81]

as stated earlier the only ones this will help are Walmart and Target. there are a staggering number of small retail businesses on-line, even many of those store-front businesses some people stuck in the 20th century think that this will help often in fact do a considerable amount of business online.

taxes aside lets not pretend that this will help anyone except the big-box retailers.

[The Dharma Bum]

They will be exempting business with less than 1 mil in online sales so they are not exactly ending tax free internet sales.