I found that interesting as well. The article is trying to link solar panel failures to Tesla vehicle failures. They were not born from the same company nor process.
It seems whatever generated the story was looking for some segue into how the price is down.
The stock price was affected by the market's new knowledge. They both contain words for fire but are otherwise independent and distant events in Tesla's history.
A more likely scenario is these liabilities that Tesla acquired a couple of years ago had otherwise gone unnoticed. They have now been noticed and the market will risk the outcome of Walmart and all of these other Solar City contracts.
The potential risk of these contracts is what is weighing on Telsa's stock price, not a handful of vehicle fires.
It was originally SolarCity that did the work, but SolarCity was acquired by and merged into Tesla.
The surviving entity was Tesla, so Walmart sued Tesla.
(SolarCity's debts actually represent the majority part of Tesla's debt load and is part of why Tesla has been struggling financially despite 19%+ margin on each car sold.)
Honestly with all the Tesla shorts trolling HN, an unsubstantiated comment like this from a fresh account is very suspicious. Can you post from an account with more comment history?
That’s a bit of a leap. It looks like fully automated compliance from the existing services. From collection to remittance is about 3-5k a year. With more competition it will likely become cheaper.
Why would it? Why in particular wouldn't the fact that you are required to pay for their services allow the entire industry to jack up prices substantially?
Why wants to win by being the asshole who did it for $500 instead of say a percentage of revenue?
>Why would it? Why in particular wouldn't the fact that you are required to pay for their services allow the entire industry to jack up prices substantially?
Basic economic principles. You compete by lowering your price. So more competing providers would make it highly likely that price moves closer to cost, because there is a higher chance that one will defect from the current price structure.
To put it plainly. You run a gas station but the guy across the street gets all the customers. You both charge $3 but your cost is only $2. What do you do to get more customers? Lower the price.
> With more competition it will likely become cheaper.
I wish I shared that faith in market forces. What seems more likely to the cynic in me is that a big player like PayPal will incorporate it into their merchant services, obtain some overly broad patents on the process, use those to stifle competition, and make the service a nominally cheap add-on (but only for their own customers).
Unfortunately they don’t have transparent pricing. So it’s a bit of a mystery. We were in the middle of getting a quote but then found TaxJar thanks to this thread and are going to try that. I prefer the pricing being up front.
FWIW, I can tell you that taxjar is pretty light on the "I've collected taxes, now what?" side. Avalara might be a BigCo but they have their stuff together, and it works at scale for transactions (especially when dealing with refunds or discounts that need to reflect Sales Tax differentially.... oy)
Can you expand on why TaxJar seems lighter after collecting sales tax? We have a fully automated reporting and filing solution that works at scale for over 10k merchants.
Disclaimer: I work at TaxJar, just curious to hear your feedback. Thanks!
Yeah, i had a client using it who found that being able to get the data into a reporting scenario so they could file was hard. Mostly it surrounded reconciliation and an ability to gain confidence that the numbers reflected actual transaction volume (it is a perishable good, so there was a reasonable quantity of discounts and refunds as delivery vendors missed targets...)
I'd also say I have a bias, as I've also used avalara a couple times before and found it to be quite a bit superior in making it seem quite a bit more effortless -- taxation is so byzantine I don't have any expectation that I could understand it, so I want to trust that the provider i use is very confident they do.
not sure if that helps a lot, but it was also a few months ago ;)
We’ve been looking at tech solutions for calculation / remittance. So far only found Avalara. I’d be surprised if PayPal, Stripe, and others won’t step into this now that it’ll be fairly profitable.
Besides Avalara, I'm aware of taxjar.com, taxify.co, taxamo.com.
Avalara and Taxamo don't list prices on their sites as far as I managed to find. Googling turns up comments saying that Avalara is expensive.
TaxJar and Taxify do list prices.
For a small business (up to 1k transactions/month) is $17/month if you pay for a year up front ($19/month on month-to-month). A transaction is either giving them an order and having them figure the tax, or looking up a rate with their API.
That will get you reports for each state, ready to file. If you want them to actually file for you, that costs more. If you have to file in all 45 states that have sales/use tax, with a monthly filing in each, it would come to $5000/year at TaxJar.
Taxify is $47/month for up to 1k transactions, and it would be $14580 to have them handle filing under the same 45 state/monthly filing assumption.
That looks like their tax filing product for ecommerce. The prices look pretty good, actually, at least compared to other others. A single filing seems to be about the same price as the others, but they have good discounts if you are filing in a lot of states which looks like Avalara might be a winner if you are dealing with many states.
I don't see any pricing for their services for their services for determining how much tax you need to collect for a given transaction.
Correct, that pricing is specific to TrustFile for reporting and filing. They have a separate product called AvaTax [1] for calculating sales tax. If you decide to speak with a sales rep for an all-inclusive package, be mindful of setup fees, cancellation fees, and annual contracts.
You can sign up for a free trial with TaxJar right away without calling a sales rep, no CC required. Sandbox API environment is included for all plans, but marketed toward Plus plans. Once you log in, generate prod / sandbox keys from the account page.
Nope. I've logged in. Registered. I'm a paying customer, using it in production, and there's no visible way to generate a sandbox key, except 'go to plus'.
TaxJar provides a sandbox environment for automated testing and development on all TaxJar Plus plans. After generating a sandbox API token, point your API client to the sandbox environment...
There is no sandbox API available without 'plus'. Perhaps you had an earlier version and are grandfathered in?
Yeah, it seems like something the payment processors have to handle automagically in some manner. Otherwise, small online merchants are going to have no practical choice other than 1.) Selling through e.g. Amazon or 2.) Just ignoring the law.
That seems to only address calculating the tax however. Presumably the business is still expected to remit the tax collected to each tax jurisdiction as required plus whatever necessary paperwork.
It doesn't really work very well together at all unless you're using Stripe Orders for physical products. You can't make the Stripe checkout.js show taxes, and it's just a big pain to integrate the API. There's a big opportunity for Stripe here to make it really simple, I would be happy to pay extra to have them completely deal with it.
Keep in mind that Stripe only provides automated tax calculations for their Orders API (previously Relay) at this time. You'll have to use a sales tax API to handle calculations for subscriptions and one-off charges.
Do people not realize PayPal has phone support? It's not some black hole of support. Just call them up like a normal company... they've been helpful for any odd issues we've had in the past.
The phone support is absolutely terrible. After spending 15 minutes on hold, you get connected with script readers with indecipherable foreign accents, and if they can't help you because it's not on their script (yes, I know how to use a web site, here's why the steps you gave me won't work), they advise you to open a case in the Resolution Center just to get you off the phone -- where I have one pending now for over six months (I paid an eBay seller who didn't ship me my item and whose account got banned by eBay shortly after I purchased it, so I can't open a claim on eBay to get a refund -- as a buyer, the UI for opening an eBay claim is completely inaccessible if a seller's account is banned. PayPal insists it's an eBay problem and I should talk to eBay, eBay insists it is a PayPal problem and that I should talk to PayPal; it's deadlocked). If you mention the word "eBay" at all to PayPal on the phone, they immediately transfer you to eBay (and vice versa). Classic game of "pass the buck." At one point, I managed to stump the PayPal script reader (my unique situation wasn't on the script), so they just transferred me to another T1 agent. There's zero recordkeeping at all (likely no ticketing system), so nobody knows anything at all about my case so it's like I'm talking to them for the first time any time I'm talking to a new person.
They definitely have a ticketing system, and they do have support that knows what they're doing. Maybe it's just business support or something? We haven't run into issues like this when we call.
I'm using the normal customer service number 1 (888) 221-1161 that you get just by Googling for it. If you know some other way to get actual support, please do share. I want my money back!
Until then, I'll believe it when I see it (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence).
I'll completely admit, I didn't use the phone service this time, purely because I've called it before. After a ton of verification, they just want you to use the resolution center. You can arrange for someone senior to call you back, but as they think 180 days for access to your money is acceptable, I'm not sure how long I'd be waiting for a call from someone who likely couldn't help me anyway.
Because the brand new MacBook is still slower than my 3-year-old i7 Air. I'm a developer, and I need speed still, too. If Apple could fit a competent i5 or i7 in the MacBook form factor, I'd be all in.
I switched to the 2nd gen m5 Macbook from the '13 rMBP 13", and would argue the m5 is surprisingly more than capable.
Granted it's not as fast on paper or benchmarks, but it's so capable I am having a hard time trying to justify my next purchase (not enough screen real estate in rarer circumstances: Chrome DevTools alongside the browser window is impossible, OmniGraffle and other apps can feel cramped at times).
The machine did feel a little slower than the i5 when I first started using it but nothing obnoxious.
Context: As a devops guy I regularly build large RPMs, run grunt against a huge codebase, compile packages from source, and all the while with Docker running OpenShift and a bunch of LEMP apps in the background.
I did try reaching out to some employees on LinkedIn. While I saw some profile views none actually replied back. I'm sure there has to be a team at Instagram who handles this stuff but finding / contacting them has been incredibly difficult. Starting to run out of ideas and the exploit is still active.
Phone support said emails sold probably start going out Monday. But maybe Wednesday. If we switched to a Pro account it'd still be a few days for that IP to 'warm up'. We had no choice but to switch to Mandrill.
