See this post for printing Paypal labels with postage for non-Paypal orders, or even just when you are shipping to friends:

Need more help with shipping? See the gold link in the right sidebar to get to our main Shipping page.

Visit our 2nd Etsy shop: GoToSupplies

Just a heads up:

I have been hearing lots of folks mention issues with shipping to Germany in the past week or so. Packages headed to Germany should have a customs form and an invoice that is accessible on the outside of the package or it risks getting held up in customs (for a longer time).

In the past buyers have also said that Paypal labels are a red flag for Germany’s customs dept, so if you use a Paypal label that might be part of why a package gets stopped.

You can get free Customs Form Envelopes for the outside of your packages here:

Go To Great Panes, Kathryn Maloney ©2012
This post is copyrighted–you do not have permission to repost this content elsewhere but you are welcome to link to it if you’d like to share the information.

Visit our Etsy shop: GoTo

We often see new shops asking this and there’s only one answer…

You should get your domain as soon as possible and consider it an investment in your business–for about $20 a year it’s definitely worthwhile.

I know many folks will say that you can be successful just having your business on shopping venues/online marketplaces and not having your own website–that you can have a good business selling only on other company’s websites, and while that is true, it is not the end of the story.

Starting with branding, it’s good to get the domain name for your business so that buyers will identify your items with your own brand, not just with the venues you sell on.

You also want to reserve the name so no one else takes it before you do–it’s been known to happen and is easily avoided by registering it yourself and renewing the registration as necessary. (You can choose how many years you’d like to register the name–you can start out with just one year and then renew each year, or choose to register or renew for one or more years at any time.)

You never know when your business will boom and you’ll want to start up your own website, or when you’ll decide it’s more affordable to do more of your business through another venue or your own website’s shopping cart, or when you just want to expand to include your own domain to the places you sell from.

If / when that time comes, you want your previous customers to already know how to find you. If you’ve been promoting your business using your domain address then you are well on your way.

If you are doing the above, customers will be able to go to the domain and find where you are currently selling your goods, even if you choose to sell somewhere new.

Even if you never sell directly from your own domain, I think it looks better on a business card than a venue shop address does & you can have your matching email address–a little more professional, making your business more independent.

The risky part is picking who to register with–you want to do it through a site where you will own the registration, so you can choose where to forward people to or choose which company hosts the website, basically have control over the domain name.

There are some sites out there that will offer to register domains “for you” but in reality they are registering it themselves & letting you use it.

The problem with that is when you decide you’d like to change registration companies or hosting (to find more affordable pricing, better shopping carts, redirect to a different venue, etc), they don’t just give you the codes needed to access the back end of the domain’s registration.

They often charge you a fee for transferring where the webpage address for your site goes to, or they sell you the domain registration when you thought it had already been yours.

Usually sites that do this are a shopping cart service where you pick from a number of pre-fab web site designs with a shopping cart to enter your items, but there are many sites that offer similar service while giving you full control over your domain registration. The trick is finding ones that allow you to edit your own DNS records to point the domain at whichever web host you choose.

The only other really risky thing is easily taken care of by choosing private registration for your domain. If you don’t, anyone on the web will be able to access your contact information using any number of free-to-use websites that offer whois look up services. It might not seem like a big deal now, but if you ever have a problem you don’t want your full name, address, phone number and email address out there for easy pickings.

If you need assistance with registration I can register a domain for 1 year for you (.com. .net, .org, or .info addresses) for $20.00 including one email address, private registration & I’ll set up the address to point at another page (like your shop on a venue like Etsy or Ebay), and hand over all the info you need to take the domain registration and hosting wherever you’d like as soon as it is registered. Just drop me a line:

That’ll give you a whole year to figure out what you’d like to do with it–have an ecommerce site, blog, gallery, redirect to any place you like… You’ll be able to set it up right away, or wait until you’ve learned a little more on the topic & are ready to forge ahead.

Go To Great Panes, Kathryn Maloney ©2012
This post is copyrighted–you do not have permission to repost this content elsewhere but you are welcome to link to it if you’d like to share the information.

Visit our Etsy shop: GoTo

Paypal monthly income $3,000 or more? Then you could be saving money!
(If most of your orders are small, there’s another discount too–see below.)

If you are bringing in enough money through Paypal, they will give you discounted processing rates but Paypal won’t give you the lower rate automatically, you must apply for it.

Click “View All Discounts & Fees” to see the rates on the Paypal site:

Current rates as of Arpil 2012:

There’s also another discount that works if most of your sales are less than $12.14–see here for more on…

Happy savings!

Hope the links there help to ease the stress of filling out your tax return!

Visit our Etsy shop: GoTo

Over the years I have learned that many Etsy sellers write their listings directly on the site rather than on their own computer, saving it, then transferring the info over to Etsy. (I’m sure this happens on many online venues.)

I understand how easy that is, but you should always keep a back up of your own business data, whether it is for taxes or just for your own records.

If anything ever happens to the original source of info, having a back up can be a real life saver for your business so if you don’t have a copy of all your Etsy items currently listed for sale and a your history of sold orders on Etsy saved to your computer, I encourage you to take a few minutes today and download that data.

Here are links to Etsy’s instructions for downloading your shop’s information:

And then follow up by either saving listings to your own computer each time you create one or regularly downloading the data as described in the links above.

Visit our Etsy shop: GoToSupplies

April 17, 2012: This year the deadline for filing your US Income Taxes is extended–see that on the IRS website here:

http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=118506,00.html

If you need to file income taxes for any reason, you’ll need to include your small business income no matter how small it might have been, or even if this year your business shows a loss instead of a profit. Need help finding out if you need to file at all? See here:

Do I Need to File a Tax Return?

If you’re having trouble with the Schedule C (sole proprietorships report their business income on the schedule C), the IRS publications linked to from here might be of help–these are documents that help address line numbers that are missing/are poorly covered in the Schedule C Instructions:

US Sellers: Help for Filing Income Taxes for Your Small Business

and if you still have questions, you can get answers directly from IRS employees. Most workers I have talked to have been nice, so don’t let their employer put you off.

You can give them a call toll free, be sure to ask for someone who can help with the Schedule C (profit/loss for businesses) if you’re filing as a sole proprietorship:

Live Telephone Assistance
http://www.irs.gov/help/article/0,,id=96730,00.html

or you can go to a local IRS office and sit down with someone in person:

Taxpayer Assistance Center Office Locator
http://www.irs.gov/app/officeLocator/index.jsp

When I call for help, I ask which publication number the answer can be found in and on what page.

Sometimes reading a rule in context helps you understand it better and you can be more confident that the answer applies to your specific tax situation.

Sometimes a taxpayer doesn’t mention all the things needed to get an accurate answer when speaking with an IRS employee, and sometimes the IRS employee doesn’t understand the full question/situation and reading the answer in context might give you the tip off that the answer wasn’t right for your tax situation & that you might need to call back & clarify what you need.

You can find links to all the IRS publications on their site:

IRS Forms and Publications

I like to download PDF versions to search the document easily for key words, but I prefer to read the online versions (html) because of the links to other pages that can be helpful.

Admin stated in the forum that they are no longer supporting the flash mini so there’s no fix in the works so if you used them on your blog, you’ll need to either remove them or to change the code to the java script version:

Guess I’ll be working on the code later myself…

Visit our Etsy shop: GoTo

If you’re from NY & filed sales tax returns online, you can find what you remitted to the state through your online Departartment of Taxation & Finance account:

1. Go to the NYS online account page (http://www.tax.ny.gov/online) & click the log in button:

2. This should put you on the the Account Summary Home page–if not click the tab/link in the gray/blue bar:

3. In the main part of the page go down to the “Filings” section of the page & click the drop down menu, select the type of tax record you’d like to see the records for & click the “Go” button:

(click for a larger view)

4. You’ll get a list of the tax returns you’ve filed online through the tax service. Click the blue link for the name of the form you’d like to open:

5. This should pop up a PDF file box for the completed version of the form you submitted–if you don’t have a copy yet, I recommend saving it and printing it.

Go To Great Panes, Kathryn Maloney ©2012
This post is copyrighted–you do not have permission to repost this content elsewhere but you are welcome to link to it if you’d like to share the information.

Visit our Etsy shop: GoTo

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently from folks wondering about how to fill out sales tax paperwork, and while every state’s sales tax rules are different, this is generally how sales tax reporting goes (and it’s totally separate from your income taxes for your sales).

This is not a be-all end-all list, it’s just to help you get a feel for what is required on your sales tax return–your paperwork may include more or less details or have them in a different order. (Don’t know if you should be collecting & remitting sales tax? See here: Sales Tax)

Please, please, please check with your state to be sure this is accurate for your state before submitting your sales tax return–that includes reading the sales tax return instructions or calling the state if you need to, to confirm you understand what needs to be reported & how. I promise once you’ve done it once or twice it won’t seem so overwhelming.

Start with your total income (gross) from the business:

• Sales to in-state buyers,
• sales to out-of-state/country buyers are included too,
• include the money you received from buyers that was listed as shipping and/or handling,
• this amount usually does not include sales tax you collected as that is not your income, you are just holding it for the state until you finish the sales tax form & remit the money collected.

Amount of income on which sales tax is not due:

• Out of state transactions is usually the biggest chunk of that–orders shipped to a buyer in another state (the one sales tax rule that is true for all states is that you don’t collect sales tax on interstate transactions),
• items which aren’t taxed in your state (often things like clothing & food aren’t taxed),
• some states don’t collect on shipping or the actual shipping portion of what you collect as shipping/handling–if that’s the case for your state, that portion of the shipping collected would be there too*,
• items sold at wholesale (usually to someone who provided you with their tax exempt number/paperwork if they were in-state buyers),
• and whatever else, if anything, your state says isn’t included in your gross income as sales-taxable.

Items you purchased on which sales tax was not collected but is due:

• purchases made using your business exemption that you took some/all of the goods out for personal use (use the dollar amount you should have paid sales tax on–a partial amount if only some goods were used for personal use),
• your personal purchases online, by mail or through other methods where the seller didn’t collect it from you but you would have owed sales tax if purchased in person at a store locally.

You also need to compensate for sales tax under or over paid to other jurisdictions including (be sure to keep receipts/records for these too):

• Sales tax you under-paid–in many states if you bought goods in a 6% district but took them home to use them in an 8% district, you’ll owe that 2% of the purchase price to the state,
• sales tax you over-paid–if you bought goods in a 10% district but took them home to use them in an 8% district, you might be reducing the tax you remit to the state by 2% of that purchase’s price,
• taxes paid to another state when you didn’t keep/use the item in the other state.

Then you have left what the state wants sales tax calculated on. For some states there’s one sales tax rate no matter where in the state the goods where shipped, other states base the rate on the seller’s address (origin-based sales tax), other states it’s the buyer’s address (destination-based sales tax)*.

*If you need help finding out if your state taxes shipping or where the tax base is, see here–look fo a link to that info on your state’s website or for FAQs, publications etc that might cover that topic if there’s no direct link: Sales Tax & Business Registration Help

Go To Great Panes, Kathryn Maloney ©2012
This post is copyrighted–you do not have permission to repost this content elsewhere but you are welcome to link to it if you’d like to share the information.