We received a letter from the State of Washington Department of Revenue today.  It states the following.

**Beginning letter quote**
Retail sales tax collection is Changing July 1, 2008

Under current law, retail sales tax is collected based on the location from which merchandise is shipped or delivered.  Substitute senate bill 5089 ("Streamlined Sales Tax") changes that.

On July 1, 2008, Washington retailers that deliver or ship goods to customers in Washington must start collecting sales tax based on the location where the customer receives the merchandise - the "destination" of the sale.
**End letter quote**

The letter goes on to state that they know that it's a big change, and they are offering to help WA retailers deal with the new tax law.  They also ask to hear from us.  However they don't mention how we're supposed to do this via ebay, or our own web site.  They don't mention that they have multiple tax rates in the same zip codes which will make it even harder to setup our web site to charge the right tax.

This will cost us more money than we could make up in Washington sales.  It cost allot of time and money to find or write the code to enter every tax rate in Washington.  I'll have to enter every city and it's tax rate.  However that won't work either.  My address is considered a Cheney address even though I don't live in the city of Cheney.  The twist is that out here in the country we pay less tax than those that live in the city.  So how is my software supposed to know how much tax to charge? 

The only way I can see us handling this will be to charge either the mean average of the tax rate, which will cause us to loose WA customers in those areas where the tax is less or we could charge the highest tax rate, which means we would loose even more WA customers.  Then again, most of the customers are going to just go to other states to purchase.  After all, they don't have to pay any tax by going to a non WA seller.

John Patrick,
Bird Oasis