A judge dismissed Amazon's lawsuit against the state of New York, upholding a state law forcing the online retailer to collect sales tax for in-state purchases. The way online sales usually work, retailers only have to collect state sales tax if the company has a physical presence in the state. When you go to Best Buy's website and place an order, you'll be charged sales tax because the company also has retail stores in your state. The logic here is that while it might be a burden hindering online sales if a small web-based company had to figure out the tax codes for every state which people who bought something from the company lived in, there's no excuse for why a business can't collect the tax if it already has stores in the state.

What New York did is decide that any company that has affiliates, like the third-party sellers Amazon works with, making $10,000 a year or more from their work with the company, is deemed to have enough of an in-state presence to put it on the hook for tax collection.

While in theory this shouldn't make any difference to New York's tax income, in practice it will probably pull in quite a bit more money than the state had been getting before. Even though most online purchases don't include the sales tax, you're still expected to pay it directly to the state. If you haven't been declaring such purchases on your tax return, you technically owe your state money.

When you're shopping around online, especially for expensive purchases where the tax would be substantial, do you pay attention to which retailers automatically charge you tax and which don't?

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