There will be an exemption for all businesses making sales of less than $1 million per year.

Amazon has already been pressured into always charging sales tax on items shipped to certain states, including California.

This bill is one of the rare ones that crosses party lines, and has people on both sides of the aisle on the pro and con side.

It is expected to pass.

Strangely enough, Amazon is FOR this bill. I believe it's because they are already being forced to charges sales tax to 1/3 of the US population, and other smaller companies are getting away with not doing so, so Amazon is losing sales because of that.

eBay is leading the charge against it, presumably because some of their "power sellers" will be affected by it. The typical eBay sellers will not be.

I am against this bill. I think it's bad for consumers, and is in fact a tax increase likely to affect the middle class the most.

The justification is that it will save local brick-and-mortar businesses from being crushed by online merchants, but in reality it's actually introducing a tariff to domestic online sales. While it's true that online merchants have much lower overhead, they also have to deal with shipping costs (expensive for many bulky items), return shipping costs, and a much higher rate of fraud. The online shopping model is the future, and this new tax plan is seeking to thwart that future by placing sales tax where it previously did not belong.

I also don't understand how small online merchants are supposed to calculate the local sales tax, which can vary from the base state rate. For example, parts of southern California have a 10% sales tax, while other parts have a 7.5% tax rate, and most are in between. How is a merchant in Iowa going to know what to charge? (Amazon knows because it's huge and has every piece of data in its system, but this can't be expected of small businesses.)

I think this should be considered a violation of states' rights, since sales tax is a state issue, not a national one. I don't understand how the federal government can make a law requiring one state's businesses to collect sales tax for a completely different state, but it seems that there is less and less concern for states' rights these days, which is a shame.