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Sales Tax: The Buyer Finds It Before The Tax Office | Gareth Kobrin, Yonda Tax
Most founders worry about the wrong person finding their sales tax problem. A tax office rarely comes looking for a foreign ecommerce brand. A buyer checks every time, because it's a standard due diligence item.
Gareth Kobrin is the CEO and co-founder of Yonda, based in London. Yonda handles the compliance side of indirect tax for ecommerce brands, so sales tax in the US and VAT and GST everywhere else. He's worked in ecommerce for about ten years.
In this episode:
- How a single warehouse creates a US obligation on day one
- The state thresholds that matter, and where they're far higher than you'd guess
- What Amazon and TikTok Shop cover, and the part that still lands back on you
- What full compliance costs a month, from one state to all fifty plus Europe
- The odds of a tax office finding you, and what a voluntary disclosure does and doesn't wipe
- How a $2M liability turned a $10M offer into $7M in his worked example
- The fulfillment change that turns a $10 tariff into $2
Nothing here is tax advice, and Gareth says so on the recording. Rules vary by state, by country and by supply chain, so get advice on your own facts.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:04 Who Gareth is and what Yonda handles
01:51 Indirect tax, defined
05:26 A $99 product that has to sell at $115
06:12 Tax-inclusive pricing vs tax at checkout
08:30 Who owns the money before it is filed
09:47 Physical nexus, economic nexus and the thresholds
16:36 Tax follows where the goods are delivered
18:04 Selling on Amazon and TikTok Shop
19:17 What full compliance actually costs
25:13 Never registered: the odds a tax office finds you
29:39 A $10M offer that closed at $7M
31:15 What tariffs changed for US and EU sellers
33:33 Cutting a tariff bill without changing product
38:10 From $1M a month to zero on one missed cost
40:03 When a US entity starts to make sense
41:30 The first move for an operator next week
GARETH KOBRIN
Yonda: https://yondatax.com
Free Shopify app: https://apps.shopify.com/yonda-tax-1
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gareth-kobrin
ECOM GROWTH INSIDER
Every episode: https://ecomgrowthinsider.com
If you're between $100K and $1M a month and paid is no longer handing you cheaper customers, that's the constraint we work on at HoloGrowth: https://hologrowth.com