Marketplace facilitator rules — what should I check first?

Often yes. A facilitator rule moves the duty to collect on platform sales to the platform; it does not generally erase the seller from the picture. Registration, return-filing or documentation duties frequently survive the shift, and they survive it state by state rather than as one answer everywhere. There is also usually a second channel: sales made direct, through the seller own store or by invoice, where nobody else is collecting anything. The useful way to hold this is that the platform has taken over one part of one obligation. What is left belongs to the seller, and what is left differs between the places you sell into.

In many places you do, and the return is not empty. It typically has to show the gross sales figure and then remove the part on which the platform collected, so the taxable line reconciles to what you actually remitted. That is why a facilitator rule does not remove the compliance work so much as change its shape. Sellers who stop filing on the assumption that no liability means no obligation accumulate missed returns, and missed returns are noticed independently of whether any tax was due. Check, for each place you are registered, what has to be reported rather than what has to be remitted.

Treat it as a recurring monthly reconciliation rather than a year-end exercise. The inputs are the platform settlement or tax reports, your own sales ledger, and the returns you file. The items that cause the differences are predictable: refunds and returns processed in a later period than the sale, orders shipped from a different place than they were invoiced from, currency conversion, and fees netted off settlement. Agree how each of those is handled and write it down, so the same treatment is applied every period. What you want at the end is a schedule tying gross sales to the platform-collected amount and to the figure on your return.

That is a state-by-state question and one worth settling early, because it decides whether your direct sales alone put you over. Some places include everything you sold into them, whoever collected the tax; others leave out sales where the platform took the duty on. The answer changes the size of the figure you are testing, sometimes dramatically for a seller whose volume sits mostly on a platform. So the monitoring has to hold two figures per place — total sales and direct sales — and apply whichever the local rule asks for. One combined number cannot answer both versions of the test.

The split is the whole issue. Platform orders sit under the facilitator rule and the platform collects; orders taken on your own site are ordinary sales and the duty is yours, which means registration where you have an obligation and collection at the right rate. Two channels, two treatments, one set of accounts. The practical requirement is that the accounting system can tell the two apart at transaction level, because every return, every reconciliation and every threshold test depends on that division. Where it cannot, the figures have to be rebuilt by hand each period, and that is where the errors get in.

Usually because the two are measuring different things rather than because either is wrong. Settlement reports are built around when money moved and your ledger around when the sale was made, and the two part company over refunds, cancelled orders, replacement shipments and anything straddling a period end. Fees deducted before settlement narrow the figure further, and orders fulfilled from a different location can be attributed elsewhere. Work through the categories one at a time and quantify each, rather than looking for a single explanation for the whole difference. Once the categories are known the reconciliation becomes a short routine and the gap stops being alarming.

For a resident, yes — worldwide gains are taxable, and the gain is computed in your own currency, so the exchange rate at purchase and at sale changes the number even when the local-currency price did not move. The country where the property sits usually taxes it too, often with a withholding or clearance step before closing, and that tax becomes a credit. A principal residence relief may apply to a home abroad on the same terms as one at home. See principal residence and foreign property.

A taxable presence in another country under the treaty — typically a fixed place of business such as an office, branch, factory or workshop, or a dependent agent habitually concluding contracts on your behalf. Some treaties add a services test measured in days. Purely preparatory or auxiliary activity is excluded, but that carve-out is narrower than it sounds: one senior employee working from home in the other country, with authority, has been enough. See business profits and permanent establishment.