5 Sales Tax on E-Commerce The newspapers I delivered as a boy in the 1960s were sectioned into news, comics, sports, and the classified advertising pages. Classified ads seemed to fuel the inner scavenger in my dad, who looked through them religiously just to see what people were selling. At the dawning of the internet in the early 1990s, an online auction site called
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eBay emerged—a virtual marketplace accessed by computer. Initially, people saw it as an electronic version of the classifieds, with the added excitement of a live auction. It soon became clear, though, that eBay was not just a marketplace for repurposed artifacts; it was a new sales channel for, well, just about everything. Perhaps it was my father’s genetic influence, but I found it fascinating.
