For context, I am from the United States.

I was going to purchase something through GOG when I got a warning message that the items were subject to the sales tax of the state I am currently located in. However, the state I'm located in right now is not my home state.

Usually online stores ask for my billing address so I never really thought about this. Do I go into my account settings and put in my zip code for my home?

No, it's supposed to be charging you sales tax for the state you're currently in (just like when you buy something in a physical store, you get charged the local taxes, not those of wherever you live or are originally from). And it determines your location based on your IP geolocation, not any account settings. EDIT: No longer entirely true. See below.

Usually, a store should only require a billing address is if you ordered physical goods that are to be shipped to your home.

You pay sales tax based on the geolocation that is associated with your IP address.
You can check what your IP address is by going to https://www.whatismyip.com

Whenever your Internet goes down for any reason whatsoever, you release your IP address (as it's typically assigned dynamically) so that it can be used by some other household. Ideally when your service comes up, they should assign you a new IP address that is associated with your general area, but regardless of if the new IP address is in your neighborhood or several states away, it is your ISP's job to contact the IP data companies that provide the geolocation services to update the IP address for your location.


If your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is Xfinity, also known as Comcast, you're SOL. The issue is entirely that you made the mistake of doing business with Comcast, and Xfinity is just Comcast rebranded to hide from their bad rep. You can try contacting Comcast about it, but they're more likely to give you push back and blame your computer than actually help you with the issue because they want you to give up and stop bothering them.

Thank you so much! I was also thinking of how the sales tax from buying something at a physical store would just be the tax of the location you're in, but I wasn't sure if it was different for online shopping.

Sorry if it was a silly question, I've never had a store ask me to confirm my location for sales tax reasons so I never even thought about it!

That's not true. In your settings, go to "account and locale," and then fill out the appropriate info in the "tax" section. And yes, that does work...a couple months ago, GOG decided I lived somewhere completely different and was charging me the wrong tax, and filling in the tax info fixed it.

Wow, okay. Good to know. But, in my defense, that's quite a recent addition, as I'm fairly sure the "Tax" section wasn't there just this summer, when I last took a tour through the various settings for some reason or other.
Yeah, I'd guess that's meant to override geolocation (which GOG definitely does also use for this purpose) in instances like you said, where the system is placing you somewhere that's neither your current nor home location -- like a neighboring state or country that you don't visit, or even a completely different continent -- which doesn't seem to be the OP's case.

No worries, not silly, really. :) But do note what eric5h5 mentioned in his post -- since that setting does now exist, you might want to at least make sure that the tax locale it asked you to confirm (where you don't live) didn't get set as your home location for sales tax purposes.
https://www.gog.com/en/account/settings/personal

Recent-ish, probably. It was there this summer since that's when I used it, not sure how long it had been there since I never needed it until that point. Might be nice for GOG to announce these things....

Online taxes are a grift on a (usually) heavily taxed populace. That said, you pay the tax of the area you're at atm.

Hello! I am glad this seems to have an easy solution now.

I wanted to point out that this issue led to similar threads here, you might also find it interesting:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/how_is_the_state_youre_in_determined_for_sales_tax/post1
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_state_sales_tax_ny/post1

Thanks thiagott :)
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That said, (online) taxes is for chumps. Wesley Snipe was also a chump but in a different way.