Hello all. Here’s kind of a serious problem that, as is standard, Shopify refuses to do anything about.
When a customer makes a purchase through the Shop marketplace, they are assessed and pay a Marketplace Facilitator Tax, equivalent to the sales tax in their home jurisdiction. Shopify collects and pays this tax on the store’s behalf.
The problem is, those taxable marketplace sales still have to be reported, by me, on my local jurisdiction’s (District Of Columbia) quarterly sales tax return. These reports REQUIRE the inclusion of the marketplace facilitator’s taxpayer identification number (TIN), and Shopify refuses under any circumstances to provide this number to stores participating in its marketplace.
So, in order to successfully complete one of these quarterly returns, I am forced to either LIE about my volume of taxable sales, which is not legal, or pull all listings off of the Shopify marketplace.
And as we have all experienced by now, there is no human entity anywhere in the Shopify corporate structure to even explain this problem to, much less do anything about it. They’d rather just leave all of their members in legal jeopardy, or render their own marketplace unusable.