Originally published on the Taxstringer website on January 1, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

By now we’re sure you have all heard about the U.S. Supreme Court case South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. This case reversed over 50 years of precedent and completely changed the way states can administer their sales tax laws with respect to out-of-state vendors. Though the case has engendered a considerable amount of scholarly debate regarding the breadth of its impact, we’ll leave those high-minded discussions to other commentators. In this article, we focus on providing practical advice to vendors who are now faced with a changed, and somewhat uncertain, sales tax landscape. We’ve broken this material into two installments. In this installment, we will briefly review the Wayfair case and provide an up-to-date recap of what each state that imposes a general sales tax has done in response to the case. Next month, in the second installment, we’ll walk through a few typical hypothetical situations to address practical questions we have received from clients throughout the country.