You don’t need a subscription to read today’s Friday Archive Dive!

Even if you’re not a member of the site, you can read the entire post, which originally ran February 18, 2014. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good sample.

If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire.  

Sales tax is a state-mandated tax on physical goods and products. Sales-tax guidelines vary from state to state, and, therefore, it’s really difficult to keep track of for webcartoonists who (a) sell merchandize on the Web and/or (b) travel to other states to do business at comic conventions.

General sales tax information

The Web site of legal-guide publisher NOLO* has an excellent state-by-state breakdown of sales tax agencies. To help ensure you’re complicit in your home state, be sure to go to the proper sales-tax agency and familiarize yourself with its procedures and expectations. You may be required to register for a sales-tax license or a seller’s permit.

Internet-based sales

The current default rule throughout most of the United States is that you must collect sales tax on Internet sales to customers in those states where your business has a “physical presence.” Physical presence is defined as:

• Store/office
• Warehouse
• Sales representatives in the area

Again, NOLO has a tremendous state-by-state breakdown to make it easy to find the laws that apply to you.

The Marketplace Fairness Act

The federal government is currently considering legislation that would affect Internet retailers. The Marketplace Fairness Act would allow states to require sellers not physically located in their state to collect taxes on online and catalog sales made to people in their state.

But don’t get too bent-outta-shape… sellers that make $1 million or less in annual sales and have no physical presence in the state would be exempt from this requirement.

Convention sales

If you exhibit at a convention (and if you plan to sell merchandise), you will probably need to register to collect-and-remit sales tax — even if you’re only in town for the weekend.

This can be a real pain because once you’re registered, you are required to fill out quarterly forms reporting your sales — even if you made zero sales in that particular quarter. This only stops when you cancel your sales-tax license in that state — which , of course, is inconvenient if you decide to go back to that state next year.

Some cities have a special temporary sales-tax license for people coming in to sell merchandise at trade shows and conventions. I know personally of the following cities that have this excellent feature in place:

• New York, NY
• Baltimore, MD
• Chicago, IL

(If you know of others, please share that in the Comments section below.)

In most cases, the organization running the convention will provide you with the necessary sales-tax registration information.

Don’t neglect this important part of convention prep! As state economies get tighter and tighter, they’re cracking down on conventions in an attempt to generate more tax revenue. And don’t be that person who thinks she’s going to “give away” merchandise “for free” and collect “donations.” You may be able to talk yourself that your customer didn’t buy it, but the IRS — they’re really not gonna buy it!

* “Nolo,” in Latin, means “I don’t choose to.” The founders of the site  thought it was appropriate given that they had never intended to become publishers.

Once again, I’m trying something new with the Friday Archive Dive. Even if you’re not a member of the site, you can read the entire post, which originally ran here last February. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good sample.

If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire.  

When Phillip Hofer, the man who created Comic Easel and co-created ComicsPress, gives me a technology tip, I take it to heart. And this one kinda took me back.

“Do not use personal domains to register for Web sites,” he warned me, “use GMail [or an equivalent].”

Why?

Photo by Mario Antonio Pena Zapatería CC-BY

He pointed me to this story on The Verge.

To paraphrase, Naoki Hiroshima reportedly lost his “valuable” Twitter account because someone allegedly broke into his e-mail by taking over his domain. According to the story on The Verge:

While the attacker didn’t gain access to Hiroshima’s PayPal account directly, they did manage to pose as a PayPal employee and convince the payments firm to release the last four digits of Hiroshima’s credit card over the phone. Those numbers are usually fairly useless on their own, but the attacker then used them as verification on the phone to GoDaddy. Hiroshima uses GoDaddy to host his own domain and email accounts, so the attacker assumed control over the domain and was able to access Hiroshima’s email address. “It’s hard to decide what’s more shocking, the fact that PayPal gave the attacker the last four digits of my credit card number over the phone, or that GoDaddy accepted it as verification,” says Hiroshima.

It’s important to note that Paypal denies such a breach occurred.

Nonetheless, it’s a security loophole that I hadn’t considered. After all, GMail offers three levels of security on their e-mail accounts. Beyond your password itself, you can register a cell-phone number and register security questions.

And if that doesn’t work, Google concocts a series of questions (based, I assume, on public records) about your life that help verify that you own the account.

The questions we ask to verify your identity are intentionally difficult. Answer as many questions as possible, and make sure your answers are accurate. If you’re unsure about an answer, provide your best guess. It also helps to submit your answers from a computer you’ve used in the past.

I’ve been through this one. It dug an address from an apartment I lived at twenty years ago and put it into a multiple-choice question (“Have you lived at one of these addresses?”). Most of the cities were cities in which I had lived at one point in time, but only one had an accurate address.

I will be interested to find out whether GoDaddy will use similar methods to put the domain back into the rightful hands of the proper owner.

In the meantime, I’m going to make sure all of the sites that I register with have non-domain e-mail addresses attached to them.

Don’t use your domain-based e-mail to register with Web sites. Here’s why… http://wp.me/p4lKly-35k via @Webcomicscom

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Editor’s Note: This post does not mean you cannot use your domain-based e-mail to register on Webcomics.com — especially for Returning Members. Rather, it’s a general, all-purpose piece of advice about Web safety.