dingman - 5:29 am on Oct 29, 2002 (gmt 0)

If you add sales tax to shipping, you have effectively killed e-Commerce

For the segments of the e-commerce market where this is true, e-commerce is enjoying the benefit of false savings. Individualized shipping is convenient as heck, but it's not efficient. Service types of things, or information delivery, have a real economy in internet delivery because it saves paper, gas, and manpower in delivery.

Not adding the same taxes to your prices as brick-and-mortar business locations masks the fact that more resources are used to deliver my special ordered 500g of Sri Lankan tea to my doorstep than would be if a store down town ordered 500lbs of it and people came and bought it when out doing their errands. As a matter of environmental policy, it's probably good that taxes encourage me to buy tea at the store. (In fact, I still order on-line because there aren't enough people in this town who appreciate good tea to make it possible for any store down town to sell 500lbs of good tea. But we buy our coffee at the store, because there are enough people around who appreciate good coffee to achieve that economy.)

I'm really not sure e-commerce in physical goods is a good thing. I'm sure that it ought to be more expensive compared to brick-and-mortar than it is. If businesses were only viable because they enabled customers to evade a tax they would have paid at a brick-and-mortar location, then from a cruel capitalist perspective, they should fail. That doesn't necessarily mean that I think now would be a good time to adjust policy to reflect reality. We don't need another kick at the moment to slow down any recovery that might be under way.