Marketplace Facilitator Legislation is a set of state-by-state laws that began appearing in 2017. To more effectively capture tax revenue from marketplace sales, the legislation shifts the sales tax collection and remittance obligations from third-party sellers to the marketplace facilitators.
To date, the legislation has been passed in 30+ US states. The state-by-state laws are updated and amended often, so you should rely on each state authority website for complete and accurate information. For an introduction to the laws, as of 2019, see Marketplace Facilitator legislation.
As a marketplace facilitator, Groupon is now responsible to calculate, collect, remit, and refund state sales tax on sales by third party sellers for transactions destined to any of the 30+ Marketplace Facilitator Legislation states. (Local taxes may or may not be included. If they are not, Groupon is not responsible for those taxes.)To conform to these regulations, Groupon must accurately understand the components of every product price it receives. We’ve added fields to our Ingestion and Transactional APIs to capture that greater detail.
As the rollout of Marketplace Facilitator Legislation expands across the US states (and possibly internationally in the future), Groupon will continue to adopt these changes. Our implementation plan is structured to ensure minimal disruption to partners. During H1 2022, Groupon became capable of accepting new Availability and Reservations API fields. These fields will remain optional until April 1, 2022 where we will begin to convert these fields into required fields.
Groupon will also capture and provide partners with any tax remittance information within the Fulfill request body of our Transactional API. This will allow Partners to maintain accurate tax information and satisfy their merchant’s accounting needs.
Previously, there was no request body passed. To conform with the new Marketplace Facilitator Legislations, Groupon has implemented new fields in our request body to include tax remittance information for partners.
