Sales tax law is ever evolving too. Amazon does a pretty good job collecting what it HAS to collect and the rest is kind of on you. I used to file my state returns monthly but the state of GA switched me to annually. I was doing enough volume inside the state that it wasn’t worth not filing.
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I bought the $300 for 10 UPC license and will try Amazon proper for a few items. I’m also looking into Amazon Brand Registry, but that looked like it had some onerous constraints.
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The Amazon tax set up was a little confusing to me - in that you have to apply a tax code to each item.
The whole setup isn’t very user friendly to learn, but it’s fine once you do.
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Let us know how that works out! I’m a miser when it comes to stuff like that…
Maybe a Glowforge for Business category would be useful here, @dan!
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When you think about all the state and county taxes and then that they change periodically, YIPES! …and then the reporting and payments.
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Amazon does a good job breaking down by county and city, etc. I wrote a software routine that will aggregate each one then it’s just transcribe into the Excel template. If I ever revisit it, I’ll probably have my routine put it into the template automatically for me. And I only file for my home base state (not doing that much volume yet!)
But before I wrote it, it was a monthly 1-2 hour task but business is business and I’d rather spend 1-2 hours a month doing a report then 1-2 years in prison for tax evasion…or whatever that punishment might be.
It’s hard to get in trouble when at least attempting to follow the rules.
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Just to follow up on this…
I ended up setting up a FB page simply to refer people to a web site. I will also add an Instagram account once I get everything up and running. I’m starting off with some free work for people I hope will help promote my idea, so nothing will go live until those items are “out in the wild”. I won’t be running any transactions thru FB, everything will go thru my web site - which will be hosted on AWS. All the pieces are in place, pages are ready, just not going to start paying the monthly AWS fee until I am in a position to start promoting and taking orders…
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Who do you use for fulfillment with Shopify? Shippo seems highly-rated and reasonable at $.05/order, but I hadn’t heard of them before. Stamps.com is more familiar, but more expensive. …and the list goes on…
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I actually use a service called Pirate Ship (https://www.pirateship.com/). I was a little leery of it first because of the name… it just sounds goofy. But it’s great. Completely free. I get commercial plus USPS pricing and Cubic pricing.
I think you get those with Shippo also. The multi-platform integration looks nice. Pirate Ship will import from Shopify but not other platforms. But, you can just copy paste the whole address and it will auto fill it for you.
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It would be nice to have one shipper between the Etsy and Shopify stores and Shippo ships via a range of shippers, so I might try them. Looks like the pirate only uses USPS (which is probably the bulk of my shipping).
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Yes, I use USPS for 99% of my stuff. For the smaller/lighter packages, it’s way more reasonable. FedEx and Oops are definitely the choice for any heavier packages.
Looks as though Pirate Ship integrates with both. Shippo states that USPS Cubic is only available if you ship over 50K units. I think that I’ll follow your lead and try Pirate Ship since it integrates with both platforms.
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