Not likely; sales tax is extremely complicated in the US. There are 13,000 sales tax jurisdictions, and many of them have different and incompatible rules for things like sales tax nexus.
Online retailers would presumably still be able to show pricing before knowing a shipping address, so their pricing would be pre-tax. That would make the apparent price differential even greater, and on every item.
I think this would make the marketplace less clear for consumers.
So if they are logged in with an address on file, it could be that. If not, they could use geolocation, with a note that the tax is estimated. And let the user input a location in a box to show the exact tax.
So we'd go from the current regime where the displayed price is wrong to another regime where the displayed price is wrong? Allegedly, something like 40%+ of Americans use VPNs. They would pretty much always see the wrong price.
In practice, the ramification of this would be that your local indie retailers (where we are much less likely to be persistently logged in) would be forced to incorrectly show higher prices to a set of people, while the giant retailers who already have your billing info can show you 100% accurate pricing all the time, regardless of VPN.
I don't see any clear wins in that scenario.
Maybe you're just less intelligent than the average consumer and need some more protection? Or is it something else?
I'm not one to police tone, but really? Did it make you feel better to say that?
> is it something else?
Yes, the something else is that you're missing the point that my comment was specifically about the disparity in the prices large online retailers would be able to display (e.g. without sales tax) versus what offline retailers would display (with sales tax).
If Amazon and a local retailer are both aiming for the same $1,000 for an item net of tax, this would mean that Amazon could display $1,000 as the price while my local retailer would have to list it for (say) $1,100. I don't think local retailers would like that very much, even though the consumer would end up paying $1,100 either way. You may disagree.
It is worse for online where until you log in they have no clue what taxes will apply. If you are buying a gift for someone in a different area I don't know what tax rules apply but there is good odds they won't know until you get to the shipping information what the real taxes are.
And if you can do that, then you might as well print it on the price tag (along with pre-tax price if you want). No buts.
Ditto for online, after you get the customer's ZIP code.
They literally can't know the price until you tell them whether you'd like a fork with it.
Now, this restaurant works around it by having both prices listed, but I can imagine a million freaking variants of that for an online sale: "you have to pay our local taxes, but almost maybe yours, unless you check out on a Sunday between noon and 5PM, which is a tax holiday on your block (but not your neighbors' across the road), so understand that the price may change between when you add it to your cart and when you click the 'pay' button."
I'm only a little bit exaggerating.
There are zero legitimate reasons not to show true prices.
Fun fact: sales tax rates are not stable. Our state publishes quarterly tax changes at the county level; city-level changes are presumably too numerous for the state to publish in the same format.
Inclusive pricing can obviously be done in-store, but it also more or less ensures that some of the items in your store will have incorrect prices some of the time.
The legislation in most of europe clearly handles this - the price displayed is for the intended customer. If you go into B&Q (home depot equivalent), you'll see prices including sales tax. If you go next door to a timber merchant none of the prices have sales tax included. If you're a business, you don't pay the sales tax. The businesses know what their taxes are, and are required to have accurate accounts anyway. For those that are maybe numerically challenged - they'll never pay more than they see on the sticker.
> It is worse for online where until you log in they have no clue what taxes will apply.
Enter your shipping address to see pricing. Exactly the same as it is now. Give an estimate based on IP. Exactly how it works in Europe, which has the same problem.