Monika Miles - Amazon FBA

Does your company now, or has it in the past, taken advantage of Fulfillment by Amazon (“FBA”), and did you recently receive a letter stating you owe California taxes? This blog post explains why you cannot ignore this letter. Please contact us right away if you need help navigating your next steps!

Physical Presence Nexus And Fulfillment By Amazon

Back before Wayfair made headlines and the concept of economic nexus became a household term, essentially giving states the ability to pursue collection of sales tax from internet retailers, “physical presence” still established nexus within a state. A variety of factors determined physical presence nexus, such as employees located within a state, or owning or renting property within the state.

One such obvious physical presence item coming into play for a lot of companies that participate in FBA is inventory. If a company’s physical property (inventory) is held within a state (even if held in a third-party warehouse, like Amazon’s), it creates nexus, or taxable presence, for the company. That means that the company is then responsible for collecting and remitting the state’s sales/use tax and also filing income tax returns in the state.

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Last year Amazon rolled out changes for sellers who use the FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) service. A number of our clients were affected by these changes which raise issues on a number of topics such as shipping costs and delivery times. However the biggest issue we have to deal with has to do with sales and use tax nexus and the resulting tax collection responsibilities. People who sell using drop-shippers also have potential big sales and use tax issues to contend with.

Under this new FBA split-shipment policy, Amazon directs sellers to ship inventory to a number or warehouses in different places in the United States. Many companies are not aware that owning inventory in another state can be a nexus-creating activity. Once you have nexus in another state, then you have a sales tax collection obligation as well, provided the item sold is taxable and sold to a taxable person in the destination state. Also, the obligation to collect sales tax in that state applies to all sales in that state, not just the sales made through Amazon.

Amazon has distribution centers all over the U.S. Here are the locations according to Outright.com. For our clients, it has added another piece to the analysis of whether to use the FBA service. For one client, Amazon’s fulfillment charge Read More