We are trying to gather early feedback since we fully released the sales tax system on December 2. Some interesting stats so far – some are too early to see any real trends, but some are substantial enough to have some meaning.
The early data shows that concerns about sales tax impacting registrations is not turning out to be a concern at all.
Participant Feedback
This is the most interesting. It has been ZERO. NADA. NOTHING. We have received a couple of hundred support requests from race directors, many of them concerned about what impact charging sales tax had on their races.
Sales Tax Collected
RunSignup has collected over $50,000 since December 3, 2019, the first full day we were live. In that time, we have had $6.275M in transaction volume (December is slow after Cyber Monday). This implies a 0.8% sales tax rate. This is only for Marketplace states. As we discussed in an earlier blog estimating that races owe over $10Million per year of sales tax, we expect this to rise to a bit over 1% overall as more states come on line with marketplace laws.
- $188 – Our largest single sales tax payment on a single transaction.
- 45 – The number of transactions with a sales tax charge of over $100.
- 9,075 – The number of transactions with a sales tax charge over $1.
- 19,468 – The number of transactions with a sales tax charge.
- 51,976 – The number of total sales tax transactions (there is a requirement to report exempt transactions as well).
Impact on Registrations
We did an analysis of the top 125 races who were on RunSignup this year and last year. We compared their registration volume from December 3 -December 15. Registration volume increased from 34,623 to 36,704 – growth of 6%. If we included from Dec. 1, the number blows up due to Cyber Monday being in December this year rather than November last year – sales increased from 51,964 to 70,654 for a growth of 36%.
Summary
The early data shows that participants are not being dissuaded from signing up for races because of sales tax. We are also pleased that no races have decided to leave the RunSignup platform because we are properly accounting for sales tax obligations. And it seems we are actually attracting new races because of making sales tax compliance simple and accurate.