Why is that a problem, let alone one that the government should address?

You want to live in a city with no retail, and nothing but warehouses and UPS trucks? Really? You should try to leave your basement every now and then.

"Lower prices due to not having to maintain a brick and mortar store are the only things that allow online stores to compete against local stores."

The word "only" isn't used correctly in this situation. There's no "only" about it. The overhead of having a brick and mortar store is MASSIVE. Employees, rent, power, upfit, etc. It's MASSIVE. All they need is some crappy warehouse somewhere cheap. There's a huge difference, which enables them to be able to eat the shipping on most items. There's no comparison between a warehouse and a few computers and a real store.

They should pay taxes solely because if they don't, we're going to lose much, much more retail than we already have lost. The tax system certainly isn't perfect, but the way it is now, it heavily favors online merchants over real, brick and mortar merchants.

"I resent your implication that I fail to pay the use tax that I owe."

I'm not implying anything. I'm stating it.

"At present the playing field is level."

Huh? How so? A customer walks into a store in NC and the price of an item is automatically 7.75% higher than if they bought the same product online. How is that level?

"2 addresses on the same street in the same zipcode may have completely different sales taxes, and you want each online vendor to have to figure that out?"

It's called a c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r. They're very good at keeping lists, doing repetitive tasks, and calculating arithmetic. Every online vendor IS already using computers. We're talking about a tiny tax table, no more than a few hundred lines. It's not rocket science. A pocket calculator could handle it. It's really nothing when compared to the burden we already bear taking care of other taxes.

"ere's a better idea. All the stores could add a note to their invoices that says what the state, city, and county use tax is for their zip code. This could be easily done via a computer lookup, leaves payment responsibility where it should be (the buyer), and notifies them how much they need to account for at the end of the year when they file their taxes."

That's 100% unenforceable, though. Just like the current "system".

"Consumers are already required to pay local sales tax on purchases made like this, most of them just don't. Instead of states requiring retailers to deal with this, why not enforce things as they are already, the individual's responsibility?"

And, how exactly, to you propose that a state would enforce this? It's purely an honor system. I don't know a single person that reports their online purchases.

This has nothing to do with the affiliates. The affiliates are paying income taxes. The states don't care about the affiliates. The states are trying to get Amazon to collect sales tax. Amazon is trying their best to avoid having to collect sales tax (and compete on a level playing field).

Most accounting software simply isn't set up for taxation in all 50 states, especially automatically.

No, but any accounting software could be altered in under an hour to do so. It's a tiny, tiny programming problem. Hell, most small business owners already pay a subcription service to keep their accounting software up to date with their own state's tax rates for employment.

I run a brick and mortar store AND an online store. No more than 5 minutes ago I was talking to a customer in the store, and she was asking what the sales tax was to see if she could buy the product cheaper online. That's ridiculous. People are short sighted and selfish. If this continues, we will have very little retail anywhere in the country in a few years, because everybody will be trying to avoid the sales tax. The gov't needs to close this huge loophole. Amazon needs to compete on a level playing field with other retailers. I know that I'd much rather add a bit of code to my web site to collect sales tax correctly all over the country than to have people avoid my brick and mortar store to try to shave a few pennies off elsewhere. I support online retailers having to collect sales tax.

Any small business owner with more than a few employees already buys a subscription service to maintain employee tax tables via Intuit. It would be a relatively minor burden.

"Do you have any idea what a nightmare it would be for a small online retailer if they had to figure out what sales tax to charge on every transaction in every locality in the country."

As an online AND brick and mortar retailer, I can imagine. It would be DIFFICULT! I mean, you'd have to have some sort of computer program that accessed a table, geez, maybe HUNDREDS of records large, and then report to the business owners where to pay the tax to! I mean, it would take a good, 5-10 minutes for somebody to program, and it would have to be updated every few months. Whoa! Talk about an inconvenience.
That's a LOT more difficult than trying to run a brick-and-mortar store that pays significant amounts of taxes and having to compete against businesses that don't have to collect sales tax from their customers.

Please not this entire post was tongue in cheek. Except for this line. Oh, and the quote I was responding too... that was literal.

FTP back and forth, select the root and overwrite whatever's newer. Unless the time on the files gets screwed up, it works fine. Worst case scenario, which is the dates/times getting messed up, the FTP client downloads everything. No big deal. I do it daily for all kinds of files.

As older, wiser programmers than myself have always told me: KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.