Today I went to purchase the professional pictures that were taken of me at the marathon last week and one of the options was electronic download as opposed to CD. This wasn’t offered last year and would save me $16 (the $84 for the electronic download is already extortion). I got to the checkout page and saw that they wanted to charge me sales tax. Whoa…that doesn’t fly in California. According to the California Board of Equalization’s publication about downloads
Products electronically transmitted to customers
Your sale of electronic data products such as software, data, and digital images is generally not taxable when you transmit the data to your customer over the Internet or by modem. However, if as part of the sale you provide your customer with a printed copy of the electronically transferred information or a backup data copy on a physical storage medium such as a CD-ROM, your entire sale is usually taxable.
So I sent the company email and hopefully they’ll fix the problem. I suspect that when they started offering electronic downloads, they didn’t re-tool their store to reflect this or don’t have a clue about sales tax on non-tangible goods.
This is a bit frustrating as I’ve had to do this in the past with another company. Let’s get with the picture, folks! I’ve known about the sales tax on electronic downloads for 13 years when I first had to do research on it; things, luckily, haven’t changed with respect to this.