@lyndal1838 wrote:
Can you imagine the reaction from some of the Mum and Dad sellers in the US and UK when/if they are told they have to collect money on behalf of the Australian Government. They will very quickly pull the plug on selling to Australia.
That was the response of a significant number of sellers on the other site when te EU introduced their seller collects system, along with "why should I do the job of the [other countries] government?" and / or "other countries' laws can't be enforced on me".
It didn't just affect retail sellers, either. Because this tax was on digital goods (which Australia wants to introduce prior to the one on physical goods), a lot of musicians (both indie and those signed to labels) using sites like Bandcamp, where they can sell their music in digital format, simply pulled all of their releases from sale rather than have to deal with the new tax.
Admittedly, the EU VAT is a bit more complicated, because different countries in the EU have different VAT rates, but there was also an option to register with a single entity and submit to them only (I'm a bit hazy on the details for that, but not too important here anyway).
These sites at first didn't want to deal with it either ('we're not the seller, so not our problem', basically), but in the end decided to collect it on the seller's behalf, so I suppose our government figured since they'll do it for the EU, there's no reason why they won't do it for Oz, too.
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