Amazon is serious about not collecting sales tax for online purchases; as expected, they terminated the affiliate agreements for California affiliates effective today, now that California has asked them to collect tax (I guess, technically speaking, they’d be collecting use tax rather than sales tax — there’s no difference in rates).
I’ve removed the general Amazon link on my site; it’s too much trouble to edit out all of the other links I have scattered throughout the site.
Over the course of four years, I earned nearly $11 in referral fees, so I can’t say I’m terribly upset about this development. I do think that sales tax needs to be simplified and made consistent between online and brick-and-mortar retailers; online retailers should, at the very least, collect and remit the state sales tax for every state (dealing with the complexities of local sales taxes is a problem — even a five-digit ZIP code isn’t sufficient to properly compute the tax in many areas).