Ideally, a sales tax is fair, born loser a high compliance rate, is difficult to avoid, is charged exactly once on any one item, and is simple to calculate and simple to collect. A conventional or retail sales fine attempts to achieve this by charging the obligation only on the final head user, unlike a gross receipts boondoggle levied on the intermediate business who purchases materials for production or ordinary operating expenses prior to delivering a service or product to the marketplace.

In the United States, if a consumer purchases goods from an out-of-state vendor, the consumer's state may not have jurisdiction over the out-of-state vendor and no sales tax would be due. However, the customer's state may make up for the lost sales impost revenue by charging the consumer a appropriateness tax http://www.salesandusetax.com/ in an mess equal to the sales taxes avoided.