The FTC wants to ban hidden ‘junk fees’ that jack up the price of your purchases::A new rule proposed by the FTC targets hidden and “bogus” fees businesses often add onto their services at checkout, aiming to do away with the deceptive practices.

  • cantrips@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How would a company advertise pricing across multiple states? E.g. on the web…

      • cantrips@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s an imperfect solution. VPNs are an issue - and even if you don’t use a VPN, the API only knows the location of the ISP’s servers - which can be in a different state.

        My point was that, the law should leave tax inclusion in pricing as optional. There is no way to implement automatic detection cleanly, other than prompting the user to confirm their location, which is a huge annoyance - so the ‘tax inclusion’ rule would not make things better or more convenient.

      • Elbrar@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        that would very much wreak havoc with caching since you basically can’t cache pricing including sales tax as it depends on your very specific location.

        of course, for things like event tickets, it’s the venue’s location that matters for tax, so it works out to be a non-issue.

        • eric@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Companies have no problem doing it to comply with EU regulations which require tax to be included, so I see no technical reason why they couldnt figure it out for the US.

        • floppade [he/him]@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Fair, I admittedly don’t know how one would implement it, but the sales tax data is being used by their clients for something.

          Looking into it further, some states, according to Shopify’s FAQ on the topic, have different rules with regards to destination-sourced vs origin-sourced sales. 🤷‍♂️

        • snowsuit2654@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          Maybe you could do more localized caching. Localities with different sales tax are finite and few. Cache pages based on those localities and then serve pages based on the IP of the client. It’s not ideal or as optimal, but it’s not that unreasonable in my mind. If it became the norm we’d build the infrastructure to sustain it.

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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      1 year ago

      They could also just charge one price to everyone and then pay taxes after. I don’t think they have to pass the tax onto the customer like that.

      Just charge everyone $10, note where they live, and when taxes are due figure out how much of everyone’s $10 needs to be paid to government

      • cantrips@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’d rather see prices without tax, than have to enter my zip code before I can see any pricing for anything online.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And cities. Even some surprisingly small cities charge additional sales tax