Rockauto sales tax collection???

Hey,

Tried to place a Rockauto order this AM.

It added a sales tax fee to the order. Fine.

When I tried to place the order it red flagged the order and told me: Can't place order because multiple entities collect tax in your location, (CO) and we can't deal with the additional entities. (State, city, RTD, etc)

Has anyone else had this problem? Is there an easy way around the problem?

Thx

Rog

Just placed an order Saturday night with no issues. I'm in Michigan.

There's probably not going to be an easy answer.

One possible work around, that might work, is to try paying Paypal. With Paypal acting as the payment processor it may use a different tax calculation service separate from RockAutos backend.

South Dakota v Wayfair has made tax collection stupidly complicated and created a ton of questions about collection and enforcement. What's probably happening is that their system can't calculate your location to the roof top, which means they have no idea if they need to be collecting City and Local taxes. I assume they'll fix it with TaxJar or Avalara eventually, but it's going to be a nuisance until then.

Paypal no work......

Sounds like you need to call them.

In reply to boulder_dweeb :

It's probably the local tax fouling things up then. It looks like there's a bunch of complaining about the Denver area in particular ever since the SCOTUS ruling. I know when my company wrote it's tie to the TaxJar API, for tax reporting  and liability, Colorado was one of the more complicated considerations.

Unfortunately the answer is going to be to either wait for a backend change on their side or use somewhere else

I placed an order this morning with Rock Auto and had no issues.  I've had issues in the past with other vendors trying to charge taxes that don't apply but a call to the vendor usually resolves it.  Because of the multiple sales taxing authorities (state, city, county, special areas like RTD) I heard there was an effort to develop a simple tool for vendors to calculate the tax based on address but never heard if it's available.  Trying giving Rock Auto a call

Colorado can be quite difficult for tax calculations, as can Louisiana. My next door neighbors are in a different tax zone than I'm in. As noted, for some reason RockAuto can't calculate to the rooftop and its tool simply can't cope with your address. I'm guessing you're near the city limits.

Welcome to the world of Wayfair. Tax collection and disbursement is costing us tens of thousands of dollars. RockAuto lives on providing the cheapest possible prices, and perhaps they have decided to limit their costs somewhat in this area.

Solutions: ship to a different address that is less difficult to calculate. Like your work or a friend's address that is in a zip code with less variation.

Welcome to the land of marketplace facilitator laws. We don't sell online out of state (except on eBay where they collect it for you)  because of this. Generally  you need a sales tax license for whatever state you're trying to sell to now, and most small businesses can't/won't do this. 

Colorado is a "home-rule" state.  Means that rather than filing one return with the state you have to file with every podunk jurisdiction.   Big hassle for sales/use tax people.   

Don't underestimate the difficulty in setting up an online commerce platform to correctly calculate taxes for every address in the country.  Companies like Vertex, Thomson Reuters and Sovos can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars just to keep your rates and rules updated.   

SEADave said:

Colorado is a "home-rule" state.  Means that rather than filing one return with the state you have to file with every podunk jurisdiction.   Big hassle for sales/use tax people.   

The state of CO will disburse sales tax payments for you. There are only a couple of small jurisdictions that are problematic, so it's not quite as terrible as you might think. FYI. 

Yeah. I can no longer use Rock Auto because of that. It sucks but I still use their catalog to get the part number and then google for the best price that actually does business in Colorado. 

is Denver the problem or all of Colorado ?

if its only Denver ship to a close by town.....

Try ordering "off-road" or "racing" headers and having them delivered to a California residential address. 

Thanks to all for the responses.

As commented, the Wayfair judgement jacked up this situation. Rockauto responded quickly to my query.

I just ordered the part thru Amazon, with a small cost penalty.

Rog

DirtyBird222 said:

Try ordering "off-road" or "racing" headers and having them delivered to a California residential address. 

Not from us you won't. There's no such thing as an "off-road" header being sold to the general public. 

So we finally found human's natural predator, its called government. 

I'm in Colorado and just ordered from them last week, which makes me wonder if it's a county/city issue. When I lived in Colorado Springs I couldn't, but in Ouray I can. 

Keith Tanner said:

DirtyBird222 said:

Try ordering "off-road" or "racing" headers and having them delivered to a California residential address. 

Not from us you won't. There's no such thing as an "off-road" header being sold to the general public. 

You'd be surprised that not everyone owns a Miata Keith. 

There still is no such thing as an "off-road" header being sold to the general public. That's the sort of thing that gets you expensive attention from the EPA and the ARB. Any vendor that is willing to do that may not be around for after-sales support.

fidelity101 (Forum Supporter) said:

So we finally found human's natural predator, its called government. 

OR

we finally found a way for local regions to collect sales tax on purchases being made in their region, to help fund what goes on in that region. You do benefit from this sales tax collection, you just don't see it as directly.

I know it effects the front range. We just had to go through this exercise updating all of the tax certs for reseller with the partner I cover and It was all of the cities in the front range that we had to do. 

I Imagine a lot of programmers are making a ton of money figuring this all out. 

This is not going away.  It is the law, and will be enforced ever more carefully, I bet.

I'm always a bit shocked when tires show up from Tire Rack, with federal GST, provincial PST and Saskatchewan scrap tire fees all listed and paid.  And they have been doing that for quite a while.

I've had people tell me that they have been charged both their local taxes and Franklin County Ohio taxes when ordering things from Jeg's. I live in Franklin County so I haven't been able to replicate the issue when ordering from them.