The marketplace already collected the tax. In most states, the sale still counts
If you sell on Amazon, Etsy, eBay or Walmart, the marketplace collects sales tax on your orders and remits it to the state. You do not touch it. Nothing arrives in your bank account earmarked for a state, and no filing lands on your desk.
It is a reasonable inference from that arrangement that those sales are handled, and therefore not your problem. That inference is where most multi-channel sellers go wrong, and the gap it opens is not small.
Two different questions
The confusion comes from collapsing two separate questions into one.
| Question | Who answers it |
|---|---|
| Who collects and remits the tax on this sale? | The marketplace, under facilitator laws. Settled |
| **Does this sale count toward whether *I* must register in this state?** | The state's own threshold rule. Not settled, and it varies |
The first question is genuinely handled. Marketplace facilitator laws are in force across the jurisdictions we monitor that levy a statewide sales tax, and they put the collection obligation on the platform. That is a real simplification and it is why those laws were written.
The second question is separate, and it is the one that decides whether a state expects you to look into registering there. A state can say, in effect: the marketplace handles the tax on those orders, and those orders still count when we work out whether you are big enough here to need to register and file on the sales you make directly.
The count
Of the 48 jurisdictions StateWise monitors, which is 46 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico:
| Count | |
|---|---|
| Marketplace sales count toward your own threshold | 28 |
| Marketplace sales do not count | 20 |
| ...of which the published sources genuinely disagree | 2 |
So the common case, by a clear margin, is that the sales still count. A seller who mentally sets their marketplace revenue aside is working from the minority rule and applying it everywhere.
What this does to a real seller
Take a seller doing about $150,000 a month, split roughly evenly between Shopify and Amazon, shipping nationwide. Two states, same seller, same orders.
Into Texas, which counts marketplace sales, over its trailing twelve months:
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Shopify, direct | $61,000 |
| Amazon, facilitated | $74,000 |
| Total into Texas | $135,000 |
| Counts toward the Texas threshold | $135,000 |
The Texas line is $500,000, so this seller is well under either way and the distinction does not bite. Now South Carolina, which also counts marketplace sales but sets its line at $100,000, measured over the previous or current calendar year:
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Shopify, direct | $61,000 |
| Amazon, facilitated | $74,000 |
| Total into South Carolina | $135,000 |
| Counts toward the South Carolina threshold | $135,000 |
The Shopify figure alone, $61,000, is comfortably under the $100,000 line, and it is the only figure the Shopify admin can show. The measured figure is $135,000, which is over. The seller looking at their Shopify dashboard sees a number that is not wrong, exactly. It is answering a different question than the one that matters.
Note the two states are on different clocks: Texas measures a trailing twelve months, South Carolina measures the previous or current calendar year. The same orders can fall inside one window and outside the other, which is why each state on your map carries its own period rather than a shared one.
One detail these tables simplify. They assume every Shopify-channel order is a direct sale. Since January 2025 Shopify is itself a marketplace facilitator for orders placed through the Shop app, and those arrive on the Shopify channel while being facilitated. So the split is decided per order, not per channel, and in a state that excludes facilitated sales a portion of the Shopify column may not count either. Your own map does this classification order by order.
This is the specific reason a Shopify-only view cannot answer a multi-channel seller's question, and it is not a criticism of Shopify. Shopify sees Shopify. Nobody is holding both numbers except you.
The two that cannot be settled
Massachusetts and Louisiana are the honest problem cases. Published sources disagree about whether marketplace-facilitated sales count toward the seller's own threshold, and the disagreement is not one that reading harder resolves. In Louisiana's case the state's own Commission FAQ points one way while a widely-cited chart points the other.
StateWise does not pick for you. Those two states render both readings side by side, name the disagreement, and show the source on each side, because quietly choosing one would be the worst thing a monitoring tool could do here. Resolve it toward "you have crossed" and a seller may register somewhere they did not need to, buying a permanent filing obligation in a state they barely sell into. Resolve it toward "you are fine" and they may be exposed without knowing.
A single confident number that is wrong is worse than two honest numbers, because you cannot act on what you cannot see.
Why both numbers, on every state, always
This is why every state on your map shows two figures rather than one:
- Total into this state. Every dollar you shipped there, all channels, no filtering.
- Counts toward the threshold. The subset that state's own rule actually measures.
In the 28 jurisdictions that count them they are the same number, and StateWise still shows both. That is deliberate. A tool that hides the second number when it happens to equal the first teaches you to stop looking for it, and then the states where they differ are exactly the ones you will not notice.
The pair also tells you something the single number cannot: how much of your exposure in a state is coming from a channel you were not thinking about.
What a crossing means
Meeting a state's threshold is the point at which that state expects a seller to look into registering. It is not a bill and it is not a finding that tax is owed on past sales. The decision has consequences in both directions, and it is one for you and your accountant.
StateWise monitors. It does not file, remit, register, or calculate tax at checkout, and it does not tell you that you owe tax. This page is not tax advice.
Sources. Each jurisdiction's marketplace treatment is a versioned row carrying its citation, the date it was last verified, and whether the sources agree. The counts on this page are derived from that table rather than written into the text by hand. Every jurisdiction was re-checked against a second source on 2026-08-03, which is what moved Louisiana from counting to disputed and took the include count from 29 to 28. Rules are evaluated against the period being measured, so a 2024 period uses the 2024 rule. The full table is at /thresholds.
Related: how the numbers are worked out, when two states cannot be pinned down, New York needs both numbers.