More and more bills have been proposed and passed in the past couple of years, fighting ecommerce sites that do not charge tax on their items. Amazon.com is often the center of these battles, since they have offered tax free items to most states until these bills started changing that. Now not only does Amazon.com have to collect taxes in New York, Texas and  South Carolina, but Indiana as well by 2014.

Right now by federal law, retailers only have to collect tax in states they have a physical presence. Amazon now has a warehouse in Indiana, so collecting tax has become mandatory. It’s the reason why many ecommerce sites can offer their products tax free, though.

Of course, there are many people out there who want to change the law completely and make it mandatory for every online store to tax their items and there are plenty of sites who want to fight that change.

Would it necessarily deter people from buying online? Probably not, but it may disgruntle those of us who love to search for coupon codes just to get 10% off. So paying an extra few dollars on tax may not be the most embraced  change for online shoppers.