How to collect sales tax as a small seller (2026)

The job

Collecting sales tax is three steps a tool can only partly do: know where you are registered, charge the right amount there, and file the return. Checkout software is good at the middle step. It is a bad lawyer. This guide is the sequence. The short list of products is the sales-tax ranking.

It is for US sellers with a store, a Stripe account, or both — Shopify, a digital product, a small catalog. Ecommerce accounting is how the payout hits the books. Shipping software is labels. We will not tell you that you have nexus in a state. Thresholds, marketplace facilitator rules, and whether your digital good is taxable are for a CPA or a sales-tax specialist. Incacent is not that.

Before you shop

• List where you are already registered. A tool should be configured to those places first. Alerts about new states are a second project.
• List channels. Stripe-only is a different buy than Shopify plus Amazon plus wholesale invoices.
• Mark orders a marketplace already collects. Do not pay a second engine to “fix” those without your CPA saying the marketplace is not the facilitator.
• Separate calculation from filing. Stripe Tax Basic is the first. Tax Complete, TaxJar AutoFile, and Avalara Returns are the second, and they cost more.
• Name the ledger. QBO, Xero, or Wave still gets the deposit. The tax app is not the close.

The napkin, September 23, 2026

Stripe Tax Basic is 0.5% per transaction on Checkout, Billing, Invoicing, and Payment Links where you are registered, or 50¢ per transaction on payment APIs and other processors. Tax Complete starts at $90 a month on a one-year contract (200 transactions and 4 filings on that tier). TaxJar at the 200-order slider is Starter $39 or Professional $99 a month, with a handful of AutoFile credits and $50–$55 for extras. Quaderno is $24 to $124 a month by transaction cap. Avalara AvaTax starts at $699 per state per year. A $40,000 Stripe month, all taxable, all in registered states, is about $200 at 0.5%. That comparison is why Avalara is not the first login.

The forks

• Charges already run through Stripe Checkout or Payment Links: turn on Stripe Tax Basic and point it at states where you are registered. Add Tax Complete only when you want Stripe’s filing contract.
• Orders arrive from several carts and a CSV: TaxJar Professional if you need the API and more than a token filing allotment. Starter if you truly have one or two returns a year and will watch the credit count.
• A digital product with invoices and modest volume: Quaderno Startup at $41 for 250 transactions. Hobby’s single jurisdiction is not a multi-state seller.
• Your controller or CPA already said AvaTax, or you are in enough states that $699 each is the plan: Avalara. Get the transaction tier in writing. Returns are a separate product.
• You only sell on one marketplace: stop. Ask whether the facilitator collects. Software is the wrong first spend if the answer is yes.

Mistakes

• Turning on tax in every state “to be safe” before anyone registers. Collecting without a permit is its own problem. So is not collecting where you were required to. A specialist answers that. A toggle does not.
• Paying Stripe Tax and TaxJar to file the same return.
• Treating an economic-nexus email as a legal opinion.
• Booking the tax you collected as revenue. It is not revenue. Your bookkeeper should see a liability.
• Buying Avalara because an enterprise blog ranked it first.
• Ignoring exemption certificates if you sell wholesale. Calculation on a resale customer is how you create a credit memo.

Pick this week

Write the channel list and the registration list on one page. If both say Stripe, start Tax Basic and book a CPA hour for the states you are unsure about. If the channel list is a mess, trial TaxJar for 30 days and export a report before you buy AutoFile credits in bulk. If volume is a few hundred digital charges, trial Quaderno for the seven days they offer and see whether the invoice is the feature you actually wanted. Leave Avalara until someone who files for a living asks for it.

Then put the tax collected into the books as a liability and pick a filing owner — you, the CPA, or the vendor under a contract. A dashboard without an owner is how a return is late.