Re:Australians will no longer be able to order from Amazon’s...
by criddell on Thursday May 31, 2018 @11:11AM
(#17196868)
I grew up in Canada and in the 70's and 80's when I ordered something from the US or elsewhere, it would be shipped to me and I would get a notice in the mail that a package was waiting for me along with the amount of taxes that I owed. That's a nice way to handle it because I could order from anywhere in the world and every small vendor across the planet didn't need to understand Canadian tax codes. I suspect if all those companies had to collect and remit taxes to the Canadian government, they would have just refused to ship there. That's the part that would sadden me.
Re:Australians will no longer be able to order from Amazon’s...
by cdeez on Thursday May 31, 2018 @01:21PM
(#17198176)
I was amazed with the Aussie approach to implementing this as putting it on the merchants who are unlikely to be AU tax payers is impossible. It is designed to be unenforceable.
We still have your exact system in the UK (and rest of EU?) it kills my desire to import unless the price is vastly different. Anything from non-EU countries above £15 gets hit with 20% VAT & an admin fee (£8 I think!).
If Amazon, or anyone else for that matter, wants access to the Australian market then they need to abide by the tax regulations as dictated by Australia. If it's the tax itself that considered off putting, that's up to Australians to decide (i.e. local protectionism / profit capture v.s. lower prices and higher global imports).