Sales Tax, SCOTUS, and Retail Technology






Front page of 1943 National Bellas Hess catalog (courtesy of Sensibility.com) and front page of Supreme Court's Wayfair opinion, which overruled the Court's 1967 National Bellas Hess ruling
The Supreme Court has overruled decades of precedent establishing that sales tax could be required only when the seller has a physical presence in the state. As a result, online sales can now be subject to taxation in the state and local jurisdictions where consumers make their purchases, even if the seller has no other link to where the transaction takes place.
The case, South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., Overstock.com Inc., and Newegg.com, Inc., was a topic of discussion in the lively tax panel at the Fashion Law Institute’s most recent symposium