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.