NY Sales Tax Headache

[lisalovlee33]

Hi:

Would like to confirm two things. First, my business address will be that of a Queens, NY address. Shipping will be shipped out of this address as well. I was told in the past, (don't even remember who it was), that I should only be charging sales tax on items shipped to Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Can someone please confirm this?

 

Another thing is I am at a point where I can go live, but I just realized that the Sales Tax in NY are different depending on the county. Does anyone know how I can address this? Currrently, I have only put 8.5% tax for NY state. Not sure how I can change the tax according to the county. Thanks.

[smokestack]

Hi.. I also sell & ship out of New York state and because the NYS tax rates are such a disaster and the tax dept. does not provide any help to online merchants, we decided to only collect one rate (for us the NYC rate of 8.625% which is the highest). The real issue is this.. New York State has about 60+ counties and each county has a different rate. You can't use the zip code of the shipping address to accurately report/collect sales tax as some counties have multiple zip codes so the only 2 options I see are:

1) add a county dropdown box to your checkout and allow the buyer to select the county

2) build a database with all of the counties (the tax dept. has a pdf available which lists all of the counties) but after looking at it (and speaking to a rep at the tax dept.) it still doesn't seem foolproof.

The problem I see with option 1 is that if the buyer is not from New York State (maybe they are sending a gift) they will not know the county for the shipping address so you will probably loose the sale..

 

I don't know of any online store in New York State that is collecting tax accurately at this point.. HOpe this helps..

[Jan Zonjee]

That's the trouble with double posting: see http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=128944 for some answers and a link to a new contribution that uses the zip code to add the correct county tax (provided the zip is only in one county...).