Comments on: Overstock Files Lawsuit w Supreme Court to Fight New York Tax Law

By: Internet Marketing Industry Unite! Fight the Internet Advertising Tax | Mediatrust Blog

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:41:16 +0000

[...] state tax attack started last year in New York: “OverStock Files Lawsuit w/ Supreme Court to Fight New York Tax Law” and has now started to spread rapidly in many other states like CA, CT, FL, MN, IL ( to name a [...]

By: dee

dee — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:22:01 +0000

Good for Overstock. The state of NY is getting absolutely out of control!

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:20:03 +0000

Thank God someone is standing up to the communist state of NY !!! It's bad enough that people in that state are giving up their acreage because the can't pay the taxes on the land, it just keeps going up and up. Pretty soon, the socialist government will own every thing in that state.

Anyway, Bravo to Overstock for challenging them on this issue.

ELMO

By: Heather Paulson

Heather Paulson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:56:22 +0000

Thanks Peter for the link – what a great article, it is always nice to hear from the top brass!

Thanks for posting this!

By: peter bordes

peter bordes — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:57:24 +0000

Heather a business partner of our called me up and asked what questions he should ask Patrick Byrne in an interview he did last night. here is a post regarding the great interview and Overstocks position regarding the affiliate tax issue and how valuable their affiliate program is to the company http://www.relevantlyspeaking.com/2008/06/05/over...

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:26:31 +0000

If I refer customers and those referrals lead to $1,000 in sales and I'm responsible for paying sales tax on $1,000 this will kill the affiliate marketing network world. It may or may not harm large web sites as they do away with their affiliate programs but smaller web sites will have a hard time getting business. This may lead to larger web sites getting larger because the smaller businesses will not take a biter out of the larger businesses market but the brick and mortars will get an increase in business.

By: Bruce Nelkin

Bruce Nelkin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:18:36 +0000

The simple solution to this law is to host your affiliate site out of the state of NY or even out of the country.

By simply doing this you can claim that your affiliates do not have a website in New York and hence the law does not apply.

Overstock dropping their affiliates though is a low blow. Those 3400 people were the ones responsible for putting Overstock on the map in the first place.

Companies that dump their affiliates should be put out of business by boycotting their product or service.

By: peter bordes

peter bordes — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:22:59 +0000

me too. i just bought "tagging", "groundswell" , "The World is Flat"and "the Long Tail" to mail to Albany!

By: Heather Paulson

Heather Paulson — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:25:49 +0000

Well in support of both companies I plan on spending my money on their websites!

By: Brook Schaaf

Brook Schaaf — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:08:00 +0000

Three cheers for Overstock for filing suit!

It would have been preferable for them not to remove their affiliates but these issues are complicated and the burden of collecting the tax outweighed the value of their NY affiliates.

3,400 is a high count but I'd wager a small subset thereof performed, as is normal for a program.

This suit will cost Overstock and Amazon a lot of money. Consumers and marketers have a lot at stake in this suit. We should follow it closely and support it strongly.