It’s all over, folks. Fortune is reporting that the state of New York’s sales tax on goods purchased at Amazon.com starts this Sunday, June 1st. Peter’s already been enraged about it here and here and I’m guessing he’s not going to be too thrilled about this post either. He’s pretty excitable as it is, so hopefully he won’t read this.
The state’s justification, you may remember, is that since Amazon has an affiliate commission program and since some of those affiliates might be based in New York, all sales on Amazon.com that get shipped to anyone in New York should be subject to sales tax. Sounds pretty dumb to me. Scary, too, as I bet other states use this case as precedent to start taxing online sales as well.
Amazon, to its credit, sued the state but it looks like it didn’t help much.