happyatheist
Mayor
Mmmm... I buy a whole lot of stuff on the internet and in 20 years, I've never bought anything that was shipped from overseas. Unless you're dealing in huge quantities of items for industrial purposes, it certainly wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to do that. e.g. if I were to buy a pair of shoes online that were going to ship from Australia, Asia or Europe, the shipping charges would exceed the price of the shoes and it wouldn't be economical to purchase them from that internet site.
(And before you come up with some witty response, this actually happened to my dad recently. He got on the internet to purchase a pair of Merrel sneakers on Amazon and saw that the Amazon AU price was way more than he had paid here on his last visit. He couldn't afford them. So he got onto Amazon US and attempted to buy the same shoes for a reasonable price and found out that Amazon US would not even ship them to Aust. because they had a an agreement with Amazon AU not to do so. The way he got around it was to have me buy the shoes on Amazon US and have them shipped to my house, then I mailed them to him via pony express (aka cheap)...)
So, no, outside of industrial purposes (and cheap foreign pharmaceuticals), I don't think there's a whole lot of what you're talking about going on. Particularly that isn't noted up front.
As for internet sellers in other countries selling into the US, I would suggest that they too would simply charge whatever sales tax their own location requires.
