Technology Slice Blog

Living Social Challenging Groupon - LivingSocial, the second-biggest website for daily deals, is planning to use a $183 million investment from Amazon.com to overtake market leader Groupon Inc. At almost the same time, Groupon turned down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google. LivingSocial and Amazon are apparently preparing to combine their websites in significant ways. But one reason why Amazon has not bought the smaller company outright is the matter of state sales tax. As things stand, Amazon collects no sales tax for most of the states in the U.S. Vendors are required by law to collect sales tax only for states where they have a physical presence. Theoretically, when a customer orders from Amazon, the customer should report and turn the sales tax in himself, but that rarely if ever happens. Living Social Challenging Groupon But LivingSocial’s type of business depends on an enormous sales team, physically located in every market in which it operates. If Amazon bought LivingS...