Martha Maeda - The Complete Tax Guide for E-Commerce Retailers including Amazon and eBay Sellers: How Online Sellers Can Stay in Compliance with the IRS and State Tax Laws

A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

Introduction

An online marketplace is a selling platform that allows sellers to post descriptions of the items they are selling on the Internet and buyers to purchase those items with credit cards or other forms of electronic payment and have them shipped to a physical location. In just 15 years, online marketplaces have transformed the way business is done. Online shoppers easily can locate exactly what they want, compare prices, find retailers stocking the items, and have purchases conveniently delivered to their doors. Collectors and hobbyists no longer have to drive all over the country to browse through antique shops and garage sales. They can buy what they are looking for online from sellers anywhere in the world. Individuals with unique items to sell can join forces on online marketplaces with hundreds of other retailers to attract the attention of potential customers and receive credit card payments through third-party services such as PayPal.

Traffic on online marketplaces will continue to grow as people do more of their shopping online. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 4.4 percent of all U.S. retail sales in the last quarter of 2010 were online sales. Forrester Research predicts that this figure will grow to 8 percent by 2014.

The two largest online marketplaces, eBay and Amazon, started operating in 1994. Amazon began as an online bookseller but soon expanded its sales to many types of merchandise. In 1996, Amazon launched its Associates Program, which pays commissions to individuals who refer customers from their websites. In 1999, it set up an Amazon auction site and Amazon zShops to allow individual sellers to sell their products at fixed prices online alongside Amazon listings. One year later, zShops became Amazon Marketplace, the online selling program still in place today. At the 2010 Amazon Annual Shareholders Meeting, Jeff Bezos remarked that third-party sellers represent 30 percent of Amazons marketplace revenue and that Amazon has 2 million active sellers.