I'm just now selling online for the first time, so far, so good. On my third sale with sales tax, though, a customer entered a non-taxable zip in her cart, and then on paypal, she entered a taxable ship to address. It was great that e-junkie made the potential tax fraud indication so noticeable on our sale notification.



My question is, how do people normally handle this situation? If I ask the customer to pay the tax, do I just tell her to send me a paypal payment for $1.95 (the amount of tax due)? Or should I just let it slide and pay it myself (assuming that's legal), and don't worry about it unless it happens a lot? (Does this happen a lot? Are there people out there "gaming" taxes on e-commerce shopping carts all the time?)



A third option is to refund her original sale, and ask her to go back and start over with a new sale.



I don't want to alienate a potentially happy customer, but if this is the kind of thing that happens a lot in e-commerce, I guess I'll need to have a strategy for dealing with it regularly.



thanks,

Joe