Must Resellers Collect Sales Tax? Marketplace Rules Explained

The marketplace collects in every state with a sales tax

The U.S. Government Accountability Office counts 45 states with a statewide sales tax, plus the District of Columbia. GAO notes that the 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair decision lets states require sellers with no physical presence to collect their tax. States then adopted “marketplace facilitator” (or “marketplace provider”) rules: the platform that takes the buyer’s payment collects and remits the tax on its third-party sellers’ orders.

eBay’s tax page has a table titled “Marketplace Facilitator Law by State” that lists the 45 sales-tax states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Alaska (eBay Seller Center, read October 5, 2026). Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon aren’t on its list, and Alaska has no statewide tax. Member cities and boroughs of the Alaska Remote Seller Sales Tax Commission do tax remote sales, and the Commission expects marketplace facilitators to collect for all of their sellers on every sale into Alaska, whatever each seller’s own volume.

Two consequences matter for your numbers:

• The rate is the buyer’s, not yours. The marketplace charges the rate for the buyer’s ship-to address, including local tax. A seller in Oregon still sees tax on an order shipped to Ohio.
• Shipping is taxed where the buyer’s state taxes it. eBay says each state’s law decides whether shipping and handling are taxable, and it collects accordingly.

Worked example: where the buyer’s tax goes

Take a $50.00 item with $8.00 shipping charged to the buyer and an 8% tax rate on both. The 8% is only an example rate, because the marketplace charges the rate for the buyer’s address.

The $4.64 never reaches your balance. It can still change what you keep, because some platforms charge their fee on a total that includes the tax. Here is the same order run through our comparison engine twice, once at 8% and once with no tax (an untaxed buyer address). Fee rates are as of October 5, 2026, and each assumes the platform’s default settings in our tools.

Net payout here means what lands in your platform balance after platform fees and any label you pay, before payout fees. eBay charges its 13.6% final value fee (most categories, including clothing) and the $0.40 per-order fee on the $62.64 total, so its fee is $8.52 instead of the $7.89 it would be with no tax. On Etsy only the payment processing fee sees the tax; for U.S. sellers the 6.5% transaction fee doesn’t, per Etsy’s Fees & Payments Policy. Mercari, Amazon and Poshmark leave tax out of their fee base. Platforms may round differently by a cent. The eBay fee guide walks through that platform’s tax base line by line.

When a state still wants paperwork from you

Marketplace collection covers the tax. It doesn’t always cover registration. States differ, and the differences follow where you are based more than where your buyers are:

The New Jersey, Nebraska and Kentucky answers come from the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board’s state-by-state page, and each entry is a few years old. Confirm them with the state before relying on them. The Texas Comptroller’s marketplace page and California’s Marketplace Facilitator Act guide are the states’ own current pages, and they treat a seller based in their own state very differently.

Sales you make yourself are yours

Sales through your own website, a local pickup paid by payment app, a booth or an Instagram DM aren’t marketplace sales. eBay’s tax page says sellers are generally required to collect sales tax in any state where they have a physical presence; for most home-based sellers that includes the home state, if it has a sales tax. In other states, eBay adds, the duty applies once you meet that state’s economic-nexus standard. eBay adds that if you sell on several platforms, you may need to add up all your sales into a state to see whether you’ve crossed its threshold.

Thresholds and what counts toward them vary, as these examples from different regions show:

Two of those rules changed recently in the same direction. Illinois dropped its 200-transaction test on January 1, 2026, and Alaska’s Commission dropped its own a year earlier. Under the old either-or tests, 200 small orders could pull a seller in even with modest dollar sales. Where only a dollar test remains, order count alone no longer crosses the line.

Living in a state without a sales tax doesn’t end the question. Oregon’s Department of Revenue notes that Oregon has no general sales tax, but Oregon businesses selling online into sales-tax states may need to collect and pay those states’ taxes if they meet the requirements.

How to check your own state

1. List every channel you sell through and mark which ones are marketplaces that collect tax for you.
2. On your state revenue department’s site, look for its marketplace seller guidance and answer one question: does a marketplace-only seller based in the state need a permit or returns?
3. If you sell anywhere outside a marketplace, check your home state’s rules and the threshold of every state you ship to often, counting marketplace sales where the state says to.
4. Keep the marketplace’s sales reports for each year. Texas, for one, asks remote marketplace sellers to keep records for at least four years.
5. When in doubt, ask the state revenue department or a tax professional before you register or stop filing.

Next step

Use the where-to-sell comparison to see how the buyer’s tax rate moves your payout on each platform. Leave the default 8% or enter 0% for an untaxed address. For the income-tax side of the same sales, the reseller taxes guide covers the 1099-K and what you report. The fee comparison shows each platform’s fee base side by side.