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It’s a gross over-simplification to say it’s only 10-cents per transaction. I have more than 1000 products and services I sell. It will be my responsibility to determine which of them are taxable and which aren’t - at least in every state, if not each jurisdiction. I can’t simply go to their site and enter a zip-code & sale price - I have to know whether what I’m selling is taxable or not at the address to where I shipped or provided the service.

Also, I have multiple “channels” for selling: my own web-store; an in-house order-management system; Amazon; & eBay. For reporting & remittance, I would have to combine activity across all platforms first, THEN report/remit. If I integrate with a service directly, then it’s integration expense x2, if not expense x4.

Plus, I checked out The STC (dot) com - not exactly confidence inspiring:

- They state there are some 7000 unique tax jurisdictions in the US, while the Tax Foundation reported it as 9,998 back in 2014. Tax-calc vendor Avalara states there are more than 10,000 today.

- I looked up a sample zip-code here in NC (27012). It straddles 2 counties. STC reported only 1 county, meaning I’d be filing wrong for any transactions shipped to the other county.

- It’s June 2018, yet their web-site copyright date is still showing 2017.

You may not realize this, but small business sellers on-line have as much trouble competing with Amazon as brick-and-mortar sellers. They don’t have the buying power that Amazon does, nor teams of techies managing the marketplace. This Supreme Court ruling is being sold under the populist notion of saving local merchants. Hogwash. It won’t help them in the slightest, and it will help Amazon by eliminating a large number of SMB online sellers.

I realize that Avalara is probably expensive since they don't post prices on their website. So I looked for an alternative STC was the first I found. There are obviously economies of scale in selling such a service once a vendor has the tax info for the jurisdictions. It doesn't cost more to serve the same info to an umlimited number of web customers. I looked up 27012 and the combined tax is 6.75 in both jurisdictions, so it seems that your filing might have the correct amounts. But there might be a Davidson city tax on top of that, not sure.

Yes, I agree you would have to integrate which you would not have to do if you used only one channel (e.g. eBay). But other tax service providers could ease the integration by allowing bulk import (provided each channel let you bulk export the tax data). However, there's no incentive for eBay or Amazon to make bulk export easy. So realistically you would ignore all of Amazon and eBay's sales tax calculations and do your own with a reliable service for all channels. But I suppose Amazon could throw a wrench into that by adding sales tax themselves whether you ask them to or not.

I appreciate your insighta. I assumed it wasn't easy to compete with Amazon especially if Amazon is one of your channeks and they monkey with those sales. But again I think there are potential third party service solutions to some of this. But as STC seems to demonstrate, keeping up with the changes may be difficult.