If I am from South Africa and I buy a US product from a smaller website I don't pay South Africa sales taxes. If I buy from Amazon I would because they have offices or a physical presence.
When you buy a product from a website hosted/incorporated in a different country you are literally going into another country and buying a product under their laws. Your local taxes (national/stat wide/city wide) shouldn't matter and don't.
If this is your experience buying things internationally from smaller websites, that surprises me greatly. When I purchase items from US retailers in European countries, before the item arrives, I get a little slip to pay the duties on the item. If I don’t pay, the item doesn’t arrive.
My experience has been that I need to pay VAT, as well as any specific duties for the category of item I’m bringing in. This can be a lot, as VAT is currently 20%. I’m okay with it though. Any item I buy locally have VAT, and I think it’s unfair if you don’t charge that on imports. It’s the beauty of a VAT that it won’t hurt production if you’re reselling the goods anyway.
That's unfortunately not the case. You might be abstracted from all the things Amazon or a small website should do in order to get you your stuff where you are. That's why there are Incoterms in order to agree who pays what.
Take for instance the issue with tariffs and China: if you were right, someone might say "Ha, I'll buy it on Amazon/AliBaba and I'll go around your unfair tariffs". If only!
But the point is, it's not the US company's responsibility to deduct your country's sales tax for them. Some companies do as a courtesy to their customers, but they're not required to do so. It's your responsibility when importing the item into your country to pay your local sales tax. The US company can treat you like any other local customer.
Isn't there kind of an opt-out? Whenever I use a US VPN to read some non GDPR compliant website blocking EU users, I can hardly expect that law to protect me.
Thing is whatever is necessary to "literally going into another country" cannot be easy & automatically done to everyone and thus effectively allow companies to circumvent the law.
If I am from South Africa and I buy a US product from a smaller website I don't pay South Africa sales taxes. If I buy from Amazon I would because they have offices or a physical presence.
When you buy a product from a website hosted/incorporated in a different country you are literally going into another country and buying a product under their laws. Your local taxes (national/stat wide/city wide) shouldn't matter and don't.
The same should apply for eu privacy law.