Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place?

We like to avoid taxes whenever possible but many civic minded consumers also want to support the local community by buying from local home town businesses that must collect sales tax at point of sale.

A growing number of internet stores like monster E retailer Amazon can sell their products at a lower price because they are based out of state and are not required to collect sales taxes for Ohio. This means that a $200.purchase from an online store is automatically $14.50 cheaper than the same item purchased locally..

Not only does Ohio lose tax revenue from this arrangement so does the county government.

Twenty states have acted to require out of state tr .

Three more states have joined the growing list where you'll be charged sales tax on Amazon purchases: Indiana, Nevada, and Tennessee. Amazon already collected tax in 16 states, and in 2016, South Carolina will join them, bringing the number up to an even 20.

Recently, the Supreme Court declined to hear an Amazon lawsuit against New York, after the company attempted to fight a ruling that its relationships with local affiliates constituted a physical presence. Though it opposes what it calls a patchwork of state-level taxes, Amazon supports Congressional efforts to establish nationwide online sales tax rules.

In one of the first efforts to quantify the impact of states accruing more tax revenue from Web purchases, researchers at Ohio State University published a report for the week of April 21 that found sales dropped for Amazon when the online charge was introduced. In states that have the tax, households reduced their spending on Amazon by about 10 percent compared to those in states that don't have the levy.

“As analysts have noted, Amazon offers the best prices with or without sales tax,” Ty Rogers, a spokesman for Amazon, said in an e-mail.

New York and others have said the push to tax Amazon is an effort to treat online and brick-and-mortar retailers equally.

In addition to quantifying the sales impact, the researchers concluded that brick-and-mortar stores didn't hugely benefit from households reducing their spending on Amazon. That's because many shoppers simply turned to online alternatives.

In total, brick-and-mortar retailers enjoyed a 2 percent bump in purchases in states that introduced an online sales tax, while competing online retailers got a 20 percent increase, the study found.

The biggest sales uptick—61 percent for big-ticket items—went to merchants that use Amazon Marketplace. These outfits pay Amazon a fee to offer products through the Amazon website, yet don't collect taxes. The products are typically available alongside Amazon's own listings.