Do eBay resellers need to collect sales tax? Marketplace facilitator laws in 2026

"Do I need to collect sales tax on my eBay sales?" comes up constantly in reseller forums, usually followed by conflicting answers. The honest answer for most eBay sellers is no — but the reason why, and the point where that stops being true, trips people up. Here's what's actually going on.

The short version

If you sell exclusively through eBay, you almost certainly don't collect or remit sales tax yourself. eBay does it for you, automatically, on every sale into a state that requires it. This is called a "marketplace facilitator" law, and every US state that has a state sales tax now has one — the last holdout, Missouri, put its law into effect in 2023. eBay adds the tax at checkout, collects it from the buyer, and files and remits it to the state. You never see the money and you don't file anything for those sales.

Where it gets more complicated: if you also sell through your own independent store — a Shopify storefront, for example — marketplace facilitator laws don't cover those sales. On that channel, you're the one responsible for figuring out where you owe tax and collecting it.

What a marketplace facilitator law actually does

A marketplace facilitator law shifts the sales-tax collection duty from the individual seller to the platform. Instead of every eBay seller registering in every state and calculating rates themselves, the law makes eBay (and Etsy, Amazon, Poshmark, Mercari, and similar platforms) the collector and remitter on behalf of all its sellers. States pushed these laws through fast after the 2018 Supreme Court decision *South Dakota v. Wayfair* opened the door to taxing remote sales, and by the time Missouri's law took effect on January 1, 2023, every state that levies a sales tax had one on the books.

The states with no general sales tax at all — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon — don't have a statewide marketplace facilitator law for the obvious reason that there's no statewide sales tax to facilitate. Alaska is a partial exception: many Alaska municipalities levy local sales tax through a shared framework called the Alaska Remote Seller Sales Tax Commission, and marketplace facilitators are required to collect it once a seller's statewide gross sales into Alaska cross $100,000.

eBay's own seller help pages confirm it collects and remits marketplace sales tax in the states that require it, and that sellers don't need to track filing deadlines or file returns for those transactions themselves. That covers the ordinary case of "I sell on eBay and nowhere else" completely — you genuinely don't need to think about sales tax collection on those sales.

Where it stops covering you: your own store

Marketplace facilitator laws only apply to sales made *through* the marketplace. If you also run an independent Shopify store — not a listing on eBay, Etsy, or another platform, but your own storefront — those sales aren't facilitated by anyone. You're the seller of record, and the responsibility to figure out where you owe tax and to collect it falls on you.

That obligation is governed by economic nexus: a state can require an out-of-state seller to collect its sales tax once that seller does enough business in the state, even with zero physical presence there. Since *Wayfair*, the standard most states copied was $100,000 in sales or 200 separate transactions into the state in a year — cross either number and you're expected to register and start collecting.

That 200-transaction test has been quietly disappearing. Illinois dropped it effective January 1, 2026, moving to a $100,000-sales-only test, and Kentucky follows on August 1, 2026. Similar changes have landed in a number of other states over the past couple of years. The direction is consistent: states are simplifying down to a single dollar threshold rather than tracking transaction counts, so check your state's current rule rather than assuming the 200-transaction leg still applies everywhere — a growing majority of states no longer use it at all.

The nuance almost nobody mentions: marketplace sales still count

Here's the part that catches sellers who run both an eBay account and a Shopify store off guard: even though eBay handles the tax on your eBay sales, those sales generally still count toward your economic nexus threshold in a given state. In most states, a seller totals up sales through every channel — marketplace and direct — to determine whether they've crossed the threshold, even though tax is only owed (by the seller) on the direct portion.

In practice, that means a seller who does modest eBay volume plus modest Shopify volume in a state could cross that state's $100,000 threshold on combined sales well before their Shopify sales alone would trigger it — and then owe registration and collection on the Shopify sales in that state. Not every state works this way; Massachusetts, for one, only counts a seller's own direct sales toward its threshold and explicitly excludes marketplace-facilitated sales. But it's the exception, not the rule, so don't assume your Shopify sales are safely under the radar just because your combined revenue is under $100,000 there — check what your eBay volume adds to the total in states where your own store is close to the line.

Buying wholesale still requires a resale certificate

None of the above changes anything about the other side of the business: buying inventory. If you're sourcing from a wholesale distributor or a liquidation platform, you still need a seller's permit (sometimes called a sales tax permit) from your state before you can get a resale certificate, and you still hand that certificate to the supplier to buy tax-exempt. That mechanic hasn't changed — it's a separate system from marketplace collection, and it's on you regardless of whether eBay handles your sales-tax collection or not.

What this means in practice

• eBay-only sellers: you're covered. eBay collects and remits sales tax
• for you in every state that requires it. Nothing to register, calculate,
• or file on those sales.
• eBay + your own store: eBay sales are still covered by eBay. Your
• store's sales are your responsibility, state by state, based on economic
• nexus — and your eBay volume may push you over a state's threshold sooner
• than your store's numbers alone would suggest.
• Buying inventory: get a resale certificate in your state before you
• buy wholesale or from liquidators, independent of any of the above.
• When in doubt, check your state's Department of Revenue site directly
• — thresholds and transaction-count rules are actively changing state by
• state, and a page that was accurate in 2024 may not be anymore.

We build PalmFlow for eBay and Shopify sellers, so this is exactly the kind of two-channel situation we see: sellers whose eBay sales are automatically squared away but whose Shopify store creates an obligation they didn't know to look for. PalmFlow tracks your sales and fees across both, but it doesn't file sales tax on your behalf — for actual registration and filing, a sales-tax-specific tool (Avalara, TaxJar) or your CPA is the right call once you're close to a threshold anywhere.

Disclaimer: this is general information, not tax advice, and sales tax rules vary by state and change often. Confirm your specific obligations with your state's Department of Revenue or a CPA before making a filing decision.

Published by PalmFlow. We build inventory software for resellers.