I am thinking of selling car dealer supplies (floor mats, price tags, window stickers, etc) from a distributor I have. I would sell this stuff primarily through Ebay.

Being an established used car dealer in PA with a tax# through the state and an EIN#.....

Would I be able to sell this stuff under my existing business name?

Would I need to establish a different company or at least come up with a DBA name under the existing company?

Would I need to go for a different tax and EIN number?

Not quite sure where to start. I'm sure that any answers I get will probably raise more questions for me....lol.

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Being an established used car dealer in PA with a tax# through the state and an EIN#.....

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Hello o:

I'd think that as an established business, you'd already HAVE a CPA on the payroll. In any case, I'd certainly HIRE one for this venture. It's NOT that he's got better information than I do. He doesn't. It's that he's covered with INSURANCE that protects YOU in case his information is wrong. You wouldn't HAVE that protection if you followed my advice. The bonus is that you get your books done right too.

CPA's aren't expensive either.

excon

PS> Do you have a cupholder for my '86 Volvo. Can you believe it doesn't have ONE cupholder???

Thanks ex,

Yeah, I already have an accountant. I just wanted to run this through you guys here first to get some ideas on which direction to go and if it's even worth going after.

No cup holders? In the 80's, not every car had them. Funny though, I had an '03 Audi Quattro on my lot for a while....5...yes 5 cup holders in the front...2 more in the back. How many cups would the 2 front passengers really have?

I've sold tons on eBay. I see no need to worry at all about any of this - you can sell as yourself or as your business, or change it any time.
No new tax ID or EIN.
Use any name you want (that's not taken - unfortunately names are never recycled).
For sales tax, you only charge in the states you ship to where you have a physical presence, usually just your own state. You set that up in yhour profile.

Good point joy....I have sold things on Ebay before and never worried about it. What makes me look at it differently now is really 2 things that I have on my mind.

1) I am hoping to do a fairly high volume if this works out and was going to run it out of my shop that I currently sell cars from. My concern is that the state is allowed to audit me for car sales at any time and I just want to avoid any issues if any of this comes up. Of course, I could really just as easily run it from my home but I still have point number 2....

2) One of the distributors that I am looking at using will do drop shipping but they need my company information such as business name, EIN, Tax#...so I was concerned about what I should do about that.

1. I can't see any issues because you are not hiding anything from taxes, nor are you doing anything that comes under car dealer licensing regulations. Those are the only reasons they would care.
2. Use your current business information.

Amazon has recently started requiring sellers to collect sales taxes in some states. Ebay could possibly have to do the same. The box stores are fighting for this. So you have to keep current on the topic, and it's a pain to get a tax ID for each state.