Sales Tax for Sellers

The short version

• Where Misprint is required to collect sales tax, we collect it from the buyer and remit it. That portion is not yours to remit, and it is not taken out of your payout.
• Where we are not collecting, the sale does not automatically become tax-free — whether anything is owed depends on your situation, not ours.
• The case most likely to affect you is your own state, where you almost certainly have a tax presence just by operating there.
• Your order export shows, for every sale, whether we collected tax and why we did not when we didn't.
• We are registering in more states as we go, so this shrinks over time — and if it leaves you with a surprise bill, tell us rather than absorbing it.

What “nexus” means

Nexus is the connection between a seller and a state that obliges the seller to collect that state's sales tax. It comes in two broad flavours:

• Physical nexus — you have a presence in the state: you live there, run the business from there, or store inventory there. If you operate from Ohio, you have physical nexus in Ohio.
• Economic nexus — you sell enough into a state to cross its threshold, without ever setting foot in it. Thresholds are usually a dollar amount, and in some states a transaction count instead or as well.

When Misprint collects, that part is ours

Where a state requires us to collect as a marketplace facilitator, the obligation for those sales sits with us. We charge the buyer at checkout and remit it. You do not report or remit that tax, and seeing tax on an order shipped somewhere you have never been is normal — it reflects our registration, not yours.

When Misprint does not collect

A $0.00 tax figure means we did not collect anything on that sale. It does not mean nobody owes anything. The relief a marketplace gives you is generally tied to the marketplace actually collecting, so where we are not collecting, the question falls back to your own position in the destination state.

In practice we are not collecting in a state either because it has no sales tax, or because we have not yet crossed that state's threshold for marketplace facilitators. We are registering in more states over time, and the set is growing.

The case most likely to apply to you: your own state

If you run your business from a state that has sales tax, you very likely have physical nexus there already. So the combination worth looking at first is narrow and specific: taxable sales you made to buyers in your own state, on which we did not collect tax. Filter your export to your own state and to rows where no tax was collected — that is the short list to put in front of your accountant. For most sellers it is a small number of orders, and for many it is none.

Why transaction counts matter if you sell on several platforms

Economic nexus thresholds are measured against your sales into a state, and several states count sales made through marketplaces toward your threshold — including, in some cases, sales where the marketplace already collected the tax. That has two consequences worth knowing:

• Your totals may need to be added up across every platform you sell on, not per platform.
• In states with a transaction-count test, a high volume of small orders can cross the line long before the dollar figure would — which is why this catches card sellers in particular.

Crossing a threshold generally creates an obligation going forward from that point rather than retroactively, but the timing rules differ by state.

States where a threshold could plausibly matter

States not listed generally use a dollar-only threshold, have no sales tax, or are ones where we already collect. Your own state belongs on your list whether or not it appears above.

This is getting simpler, not harder

We are working through registration in every state with a sales-threshold nexus, and in states where we have a critical mass of sellers even where we have not crossed the threshold. As each one lands, we start collecting and remitting on those sales automatically and they stop being anything you need to think about. The share of your sales in that category has been growing steadily and should keep growing over the coming months, so expect this page to matter less to you over time, not more.

If this turns into a real bill, tell us

What to take to your accountant

1. Your Misprint export, from Order Management, which shows per sale whether tax was collected and why not when it wasn't.
2. The same for any other platform you sell on, since thresholds are measured on your combined sales.
3. Which state you operate from, so they can start with your physical nexus.

If something in your export looks wrong rather than merely confusing, tell us — we would rather fix a reporting bug than have you work around it. See also seller tax reporting for income tax, which is a separate topic, and sales tax for what buyers are charged.