Do you want to put in your shipping address to every website before you can shop?
In some areas, sales tax is actual multiple taxes from different overlapping jurisdictions: state, county, city, and sometimes special tax district. ZIP codes don't align with any of these, so you need to know exactly where the buyer is in order to properly calculate sales tax.
There are places where adjacent addresses in the same ZIP code have different sales tax rates.
There's probably a Things Developers Believe About ZIP Codes list out there somewhere.
It was never the norm that websites never asked for your shipping address or zipcode before allowing shopping. That's really silly.
But I guess that would outside FTC jurisdiction?
Most online shops have a good estimate of your location based on IP. And already use it to estimate shopping costs, right?
Mind you, I'm all for more up-front transparency in general, especially to the degree that comparison-shopping is inconsistent to the degree it displays or doesn't display often significant add-ons.
One for in-person shopping (like VAT) -- you pay the tax according to local rates, but it's factored in already.
one for online shopping, ("E-VAT") -- you pay a national rate tax and the seller is responsible for paying gross sales based on that percentage to the state and the rest goes to the IRS.
Problem comes with the Sin Taxes that have been established. For instance, in Seattle, sugared drinks MAY incur a tax depending on what kind of store you bought it from (e.g. the normal costco has to tax it but the business costco doesn't), but that doesn't affect some folks and then there's tax-exempt organizations like churches that can have their sales tax waived and then there's states where sales taxes are a majority of the income is from sales tax but only if you're local and
oh god it gets bad.
Good for me, my zipcode is the Walmart of zip codes. No so good for people who's zip code is the Whole Foods of zip codes.
Meanwhile, 99% of people will see the price they can expect to pay.
That seems like terrible advice. Oh, the price is $X. And once you've entered all your info "just kidding." I'd much rather know there are some things not included up-front if they're not reasonably factored in.
Or better yet, give municipalities an incentive to stop layering a kinds of taxes. Just have a VAT and be done with it.
Everyone is an edge case in some form. You, included.
Just have a VAT and be done with it.
This just illustrates that you don't understand the that taxes have multiple purposes, and why taxes are the way they are. Attend a few city council meetings.
I bet that's wrong, and that a huge chunk of shopping is from cell phones that usually have an effectively random IP when they're not at their home location.
Switching our tax regime to VATs, effectively flattening 13,000+ sales tax jurisdictions down to 50, would be a monumental undertaking involving rethinking and reorganizing financing of literally everything below the federal level. And in the end it would solve a problem that is at best a minor annoyance to most Americans.
The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
Not really, no.
Zip codes also aren't great either. A single zip code can cover many different tax jurisdictions, even different states.