How to make Sales Tax Exempt Purchases

[rmplymire]

I am a business which sometimes buy item thru ebay. I am a resident of Ohio and items purchased from Ohio based business selling thru ebay charge me sales tax. I am a reseller with an Ohio vendor licesne. I need not to pay sales tax on items purchased. How do I do this with ebay?

[sharpiemarker]

eBay is not a b2b site so you'll have to contact the seller to arrange not to pay sales tax prior to purchasing.

[rmplymire]

Thank You

[Tiredope]

I have ordered tax exempt for HomeDepot products, no problem.  But as soon as I charge through PayPal onto a credit card they seem to automatically add sales tax - disregarding what HomeDepot have on the order!   

[DPCreations]

PayPal doesn't automatically add sales tax as PayPal, as a business, does not collect nor submit sales tax payments.  Thatis all up to the merchant.  The merchant controls tax collection.  You need to contact Home Depot; they control how the account is setup.  Did you submit your state sales tax certificate to the merchant?  A merchant can't arbitrarily decide not to collect sales tax.

[Tiredope]

All I can say is that is exactly what happened.  I had my HomeDepot tax exempt number on the order and was not showing a taxable sale.  It is only when I made the fateful decision to pay by PayPal rather than a direct card payment did the problem arise.  I called HomeDepot when I spotted the error and they graciously gave me credit against another purchase.  Now there is a mysterious charge showing against that order by HomeDepot as though someone else in the company is not allowing them to credit me the tax.  I'm not risking a tax exempt sale again through PayPal.

[DPCreations]

I think avoiding the risk.

Always better to use a credit card direct for a purchase--too much risk to pass it needlessly through PayPal.

I don't know what state you are in but an official way to handle the sales tax collected when a merchant does not have a provision for retail tax exempt sales.  In Florida the way to handle it is to add the collected sales tax to the legal tax credit line of the tax submission form.  I checked with the state tax officials to confirm that.   When re-selling you definitely don't want sales tax to be part of your cost of goods sold, so take the credit on the form.