Calculating tax should be a case of simple math, no highly sophisticated gizmos needed. This company has a problem here.

It's worth it, because while it's only $6 for YOU, it could easily be higher for someone else, and they need to fix it. This is not rocket science. Tax where I live is 8.3%. So if you have a purchase of $124.69, tax is $10.35, making the total $135.04, AND I SUCK AT MATH!

Yeah, it's as simple as calculating tax based on state. I guess I'm never going to shop at ninewest.com.

Well, I would say it would depend on your actual sales tax liability. If in fact, your taxes were overcharged, then I would bring the issue up with the state comptrollers, I'm sure they'd be interested in any retailer overcharging taxes. If it's a website glitch and the price that was quoted was lower than the expected tax amount, then it's really piss poor website design by them, but not much you can do.

Nine West should reimburse her - Just curious though, which tax is the right amount? The one she was originally quoted, or the tax amount that was charged?

Agreed. Every other online store I have ever shopped with gets this correct. I recommend firing your web developers Nine West. They clearly have no clue what they are doing.

It's not always so easy to calculate taxes for online merchants, and here's an example why.

Living in the outskirts of Oklahoma City some years ago, I lived in a zip code that encompassed two counties, two cities and an unincorporated area. The sales tax rate in my county was 8.375%, but a few blocks away, in the unincorporated portion of the next county, the tax rate was 9.5%. There was a 3rd rate in the other town.

The online merchant couldn't determine what tax rate there was by municipality or by zip code. They would have to know on a streetwise, block-by-block basis what the tax rate was. So, the merchant (a check printing company) charged the higher rate to everybody.

This must be an issue for many places where there are differing city and county tax rates.

Does Nine West realize that they aren't the only online vendor and that there are thousands (millions?) of other sites that have no problem figuring out tax at the time of purchase?

Cue the commenters chiming in with comments about local city, county, neighborhood, etc. taxes on top of the state tax. Not so simple, sometimes. They may have calculated the state tax for checkout purposes, but missed a specific local or city tax that applied to the buyer's address and decided to try to collect that too.

Not saying what they did or how they handled it was right, just saying.

Actually, since they have retail stores, this is understandable. My state has cracked down on sales taxes, and there are different tax rates for the city, county, special taxing districts, etc. So it will come down to what the tax rate was to the closest store to the shipping address. The state made it clear recently that even shipments delivered outside of the special taxing districts have to be charged, so they probably got hit with back taxes, so they're being overcautious.

Even so, I would have just eaten the difference under good customer service.

That's why there should be no taxes on internet purchases, like Jesus intended.

@pecan 3.14159265: Apple, for example, didn't calculate sales tax based on my state but on my particular local sales tax rate, so I don't think it is necessarily as easy as charging based on state.

That being said, Apple was able to figure out the amount in real time. Perhaps Nine West could ask them for advice.

@ChuckECheese: I live in Alexandria City and there is also an Alexandria in Fairfax County VA. When I make an online purchase usually something pops up and says "Alexandria City of Fairfax County"

@edwardso: OR

I think the only mistake is the 9 West should not have estimated taxes and instead included a line stating "taxes will be calculated upon shipping" or something like that. It's pretty standard for a lot of these online/brick&mortar retailers to do this. It's because they have hundreds of stores, and the online website is not connected to their tax database. Are you really going to complain about the $6?

Most jurisdictions require you to pay the tax, even if the retailer doesn't collect it. They could let her pay the lower amount, but she still owes the tax.

@TCinIowa: Did Jesus twitter that?

As someone who actually grapples with this question as part of my job - Consumerist, you are absolutely wrong. Another poster pointed this out - the multiple tax jurisdictions within every state make it nearly impossible to figure out what the correct tax rate is with any certainty.

Until the states come up with a streamlined tax code, you will get this kind of problem, and it is only going to grow larger.

@pecan 3.14159265: Unfortunately, this is wrong.

Sales tax can be done at the county level (and is in Chicago area). Chicago alone, not the state, has the nations HIGHEST sales tax (arguably). This was done through the COUNTY.

What's funny is that this is an issue with Nine West cutting their IT budget and not caring. This is a simple fix that is commonly implemented (Apple, on checkout, asks for my COUNTY to verify Tax).

This is pure laziness on NW's part. Some VP has decided that the resources to fix this and the cost to fix is just not worth it to him/her.

@edwardso: Apple does this. It provides me a pulldown with counties.

I've literally never had this happen with any retailer on the net. Nine west must have decided they were big enough not to use a payment service like the small guys, but too cheap to pay out for the many tax packages that *can* get this right. Its not hard, there are turnkey solutions for this exact problem.

I run my own online store, much simpler than ninewests. It is simple, you put in the tax rate for each state. at checkout it adds it. nothing complex. most shopping cards come with it prefigured. and you only have to charge tax if its being sold within the same state (unless you operate in that state also).

@DeanOfAllTrades: the issue (imho) is that they didn't tell her what they would charge. it happened to be $6, but it could have been $100 more, and that is a serious thing. they should either a. update their tax calculation software and make it more specific (i.e. know the tax in her specific area rather than state) b. send her an email with the updated tax to let her know what will be charged and asking her to verify before processing the transaction c. send her an email to let her know the specific amount of money they ended up charging her for her official record

i guess to sum up, she should know exactly how much she's getting charged from them, not afterward from her credit card bill?

@UX4themasses: Wrong. Sales tax can be calculated at the county level in SOME states, but not ALL states.

In Washington State, it is done at the city level, and even within that, there are variations depending on the zip+4 code. When you add in the fact that many customers do not know their zip+4 code, and that address verification services are not as good as their advertising would have you believe, you have the recipe for a situation like the OP described.

This is not as easy as it would seem, people.

@DeanOfAllTrades: Yes, she's really going to complaina bout the $6, because this is an easily fixed problem and ignoring it won't get it foxed. Yes, sometimes complaining about "only $6" is worth it.

How dumb is this. Yes, this is a big deal and she should complain if for no other reason than this is standard operating procedure. It's probably happened on many occasions and will continue to happen. Just because people may not have noticed or thought it wasn't worth the trouble for a few bucks doesn't make it ok.

Everyone on this site shops online all the time. Has anyone ever encountered this with another company? I never have. Why should Nine West get off with the "we are too lazy and stupid to fix it" excuse if everyone else manages to get it right?

@dragonfire81: “Calculating tax should be a case of simple math, no highly sophisticated gizmos needed. This company has a problem here.”

As others have commented later in this thread, it is not as trivial as you suggest. Sales tax rates vary, as you undoubtedly know, by state, but they also vary by county, city and special taxing district. I work with Accounts Receivables systems and tax calculation is complicated, based on the customer address. It can vary by ZIP code and even by street address within ZIP code. In addition, some districts have additional rules, such as a cap on total sales tax that can be charged on a shipped order.

The software that performs the calculation is clearly attached to their billing system, so it calculates in conformance with all the regulations, but this vendor has only attached a simple software solution to their web site, perhaps to save money.

The net result is the difference between quoted and actual that the OP observed. If I were the IT manager or the AR manager at Nine West, I wouldn’t accept this because of the negative impact on customer perceptions, as witnessed here. Putting a disclaimer on the web page is better than nothing, but still not good enough. Other web sites get it right, why do they chose to do it wrong?

Vertex: http://www.vertexinc.com//solutions/indirect/calc-engines.asp

It's 2009. People have been buying stuff on the information superhighway for nigh on 15 years. Get with the program, Nine West.

Sure, internet sales tax is a new phenomenon, but it's not impossible to figure out state, county, and city sales tax. If the OP had gone to her local store, it's probable she would have been charged the correct tax amount. If Nine West can figure it out at the store level, why can't it do it on its website?

@UX4themasses: I envision some sort of populist revolt using the quarters that should be going into Chicago's parking meters. Maybe NW will let Chicago residents pay the extra tax with quarters.

@Roy Hobbs: If it's not that easy why are so many retailers getting it right?

Well before everyone and their maiden aunt had a computer, people learned how to calculate percentages on paper with a pencil in grade 5.

A nationwide chain should have zero problem calculating the correct sales tax for online purchases. Not rocket science -- grade 5 math question, NineWest.

Chargeback, they should learn.

@Cyclokitty:

The issue isn't doing the Y*(1+X) calculation (where Y is purchase price, and X is the tax rate), but rather determining what X is.

@edwardso: Who says they are getting it right?

In this case, the only reason that the OP realized there was a problem was that after the order shipped, it went through two separate tax verification systems before she was charged the extra amount.

My experience is that most companies charging tax on internet purchases are simply getting close enough (i.e. county level, perhaps), rather than going through all the crap that it takes to get it really, really right.

I'm really, really crap at math -- failed-precalc-the-first-try crap -- but even I can calculate sales tax. With a pocket calculator. Or with some paper and a pen. And I'm pretty dang sure that a major national company with a top-notch website has more than a pen and paper at their disposal.

@Roy Hobbs: It's all calculable from zip code, and city and county don't matter if the vendor isn't also in that city or county. It's really not that complicated, and most online merchants calculate tax just fine.

Can anyone straighten out the contradicting statements here?
The company says When placing your online order, on your checkout page you will see that we indicate the sales tax amount as being an approximate rate.
But the OP says At no point before it showed up on my credit card statement was I told that there would be an additional charge.

Who's right?

As for the difficulty in calculating taxes, does it even matter how hard it is?

@Roy Hobbs: As someone who actually grapples with this question as part of my job - Consumerist, you are absolutely wrong. Another poster pointed this out - the multiple tax jurisdictions within every state make it nearly impossible to figure out what the correct tax rate is with any certainty.

Wouldn't they have some kind of database that associates ZIP code with tax code? Presumably, there are several B2B companies out there in the world that provide, license, and maintain just such databases of basic information. And presumably part of running a large-scale online business is using such databases.

@Roy Hobbs: This doesn't make any sense. They did calculate her tax to what's presumably certainty. They just did it later. Other merchants do it at the same time as the order. What makes Nine West different from Victoria's Secret, Barnes and Noble, or any other online merchant with multiple brick and mortar entities and thus multiple flavors of tax obligation?

@ChuckECheese: Now that's interesting--I hadn't heard of a locale wherein same zip codes would have different tax. However, unless your online merchant has a b&m presence there, it's still not going to be an issue.

This is only going to be an issue with those who live in zip codes that overlap county borders. My zip code overlaps LA and Orange Counties (which are half a cent different). Every retailer I have dealt with has either figured it out (note: phone area codes can help determine counties) or asked (Apple asks) and applied the correct tax.

If the tax rate that was ultimately applied was correct then the OP does not have a claim for return of the $6 because tax rate is mandated by the state/county but as others have noted estimating the tax incorrectly is inexcusable for anything more than a Mom & Pop shop. Really Nine West? How much bad publicity can $6 buy you?

@UX4themasses: @Roy Hobbs: Well, I stand corrected. Sort of, since I'm sitting. I've never lived within a city limit, only the county limit, so my tax calculations have always been relatively simple...hmm..I'll keep this in mind for the future.

@hillsrovey: You should see his followers list.

@great_equalizer: So you collect state tax but ignore collecting all the various city, county and other local sales taxes in locations that have multiples? That's more common now than ever before.

Hope you have a big savings account stashed away somewhere to pay that bill when it comes due.

@ChuckECheese: It's sort of irrelevant here. The merchant was able to calculate the correct* tax rate and charged that amount. There's little reason why they couldn't have set up the online system to do the same calculation before the final verification at the time of purchase, instead of giving a bogus rate (estimated rate). The question is, why is it calculable at one point and not another?

*This is assuming they calculated it correctly at this point, but that's a fair assumption without more information.

Where does one have to live to get charged 10.25% sales tax as implied by Jane's bill above? I thought NYC was bad...

I work for Staples and its the same with our Internet ordering. But it specifically says that tax listed online is an estimate and when you get an email confirmation that is the exact tax

I would have more problem with the sales tax being wrong and people not noticing.

@floraposte: If you have a brick and mortar store, calculating the tax is straightforward, because you presumably know exactly where your own store is located.

However, when you rely on the customer to tell you where they are, especially when dealing with multiple taxing authorities, you are asking for a world of hurt.

And not to get on too much of a political rant here, but stuff like this is why dealing with the government drives me bananas sometimes. Rather than creating a sales tax system that is reasonable to understand and implement, there are an insanely complex set of rules for every single transaction that are nearly impossible to deal with.

Clearly, the founders could not have anticipated the internet, but this is one of the reasons for the Interstate Commerce Clause in the Constitution, inconvenient though it might be for states that want to raise more revenue.