I am not an attorney and this should not be taken as legal advice. It’s just based on my experience as a course creator.
Teachable does not collect state sales taxes for you. They also don’t collect taxes for all international sales. If a user from Japan buys your course, you are responsible for paying sales tax in Japan. If a user buys the course in a state in the US, you need to submit sales taxes to that state.
That’s a huge pain in the ***. My bookkeeper advised me to hire experts in all countries where I have sales!
Yeah, well…
But fortunately, I found an alternative solution: Resellers such as Digistore or Fastspring. They collect and submit sales tax for you.
- You create a sales page on your website.
- If the customer decides to buy the course, he gets forwarded to the checkout page provided by the reseller.
- The reseller handles payment and shipping of the content (or the course access), as well as sales tax, etc. This service costs around 10% of your sales.
- You get paid at the end of the month in proportion to the sales.
A very simple work-around to this problem. Here’s how it works on my Python freelancer course.
While working as a researcher in distributed systems, Dr. Christian Mayer found his love for teaching computer science students.
To help students reach higher levels of Python success, he founded the programming education website Finxter.com that has taught exponential skills to millions of coders worldwide. He’s the author of the best-selling programming books Python One-Liners (NoStarch 2020), The Art of Clean Code (NoStarch 2022), and The Book of Dash (NoStarch 2022). Chris also coauthored the Coffee Break Python series of self-published books. He’s a computer science enthusiast, freelancer, and owner of one of the top 10 largest Python blogs worldwide.
His passions are writing, reading, and coding. But his greatest passion is to serve aspiring coders through Finxter and help them to boost their skills. You can join his free email academy here.