StrikeIron Blog

"Sheer Complexity" of Collecting Online Sales Tax?

I came across this article over the weekend about the renewed effort in Congress to collect online sales tax:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,516988,00.html

While a controversial subject in general, one statement in the article in particular caught my attention:

"The sheer complexity of sales-tax-collection in the U.S. — it's estimated there are about 7,000 different states, counties, municipalities and other governmental agencies that collect it — has made it nearly impossible to collect taxes from online retailers."

Whoever wrote the article obviously wasn't aware of StrikeIron's sales tax calculation Web services API's. By simply providing the shipping address, a simple XML call calculates the appropriate sales tax amounts for the various jurisdictions of the ship-to address. They can be integrated into e-commerce Web sites, shopping cart applications, and just about anything else that can consume a SOAP or REST-based Web service. They can easily be incorporated with credit card systems, Pay Pal, Amazon FPS, Google Checkout, and many other online e-commerce systems.

StrikeIron offers several of these sales tax rate services on a subscription basis, from basic sales tax rates for US & Canada that are useful in some scenarios, to comprehensive sales tax rate data services that handle fine granularity of tax jurisdictions, product-dependent tax rates, tax holidays, and more.

So while there may be a whole host of other reasons while there shouldn't be online sales tax, "sheer complexity" isn't one of them.

Worldwide Address Verification

Question:  What do the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Hofbräuhaus in Munich, and the Louvre in Paris all have in common?

Answer: All of their addresses can be verified using StrikeIron's Global Address Verification Web Service.

Incorrect international addresses can be very expensive in business, especially in terms of missed communications, hard missed shipment and re-routing costs, and a whole range of customer service issues. Now, these challenges can be ancient world history.

In modern global commerce, the easy ability to verify the correctness of an address all over the world in an automated way is a no-brainer, especially as inexpensive as it is. Easy integration with StrikeIron's Global Address Verification Web Service enables this to be achieved with very little effort and cost.

The capability is available both as a real-time Web service to verify address information as it comes across a Web form for example, but also interactively to give someone a choice (perhaps in a call center) to choose the nearest or correct address from a proximity list.

The SOAP and REST-based Web services also include advanced features such as country of origin, preferred localization (London versus Londres), and covers 240 countries around the world. They are also available for easy integration into Salesforce.com.

Best of all, this is really the same as outsourcing this capability via an easy to integrate XML-based Web service. It can fit a wide variety of Web applications, business processes, and even mobile devices. No data updates, no maintenance, no hardware, no hassle.

Maybe someday, applications with bad international addresses will be in a museum somewhere.