Amazon Prime Day is Here. Is Your Tax Authority Ready?

Amazon Prime Day has become a cornerstone of the global eCommerce calendar. Traditionally a two-day sales event, it has grown into a four-day phenomenon in 2025, spanning July 8-11, featuring massive online sales, deep discounts, and a tidal wave of digital transactions. For consumers, it’s an opportunity to seize some great lightning deals. For tax administrators, it’s a unique moment to ensure that sales tax compliance keeps pace with the surge in digital activity.

With the rapid expansion of online commerce, many sellers—particularly those operating across platforms and/or jurisdictions—face growing complexity in understanding and meeting their sales tax obligations. As independent sellers jump on the Prime Day bandwagon by offering their own deals, we see thousands of sellers participating in a condensed period of high-volume sales – both through Amazon, and through their own websites, Etsy, social media channels, and more. And as sales across these platforms surge, so too does the risk of underreporting and noncompliance.

While many marketplace platforms issue 1099-K forms, they do so only when sellers exceed certain thresholds on their platform. On Amazon, for example, sellers must exceed both $20,000 in gross payment volume and 200 transactions in a fiscal year to receive a 1099-K – leaving a wide swath of high-volume sellers with no third-party income reporting at all. Also, these marketplace platform thresholds can consider only the business happening on their platforms, and many sellers actually sell through multiple platforms or channels. While most sellers want to comply with tax requirements, there are those who are intentionally avoiding these thresholds and their reporting obligations by splitting their transactions across multiple accounts or platforms. For state tax authorities, these blind spots mean millions in potential revenue goes unreported.

How Tax Authorities Can Leverage the Digital Age to Keep Pace with Online Sellers

To stay ahead of the digital sales curve, tax administrators must look beyond traditional audit methods. This is where Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) comes in. While it may sound like an advanced concept, OSINT is actually very simple: it’s the practice of leveraging publicly available data to gain insights. Publicly available data is any data that isn’t proprietary, or locked behind a firewall. With OSINT, this vast amount of public data generated online can be aggregated and analyzed to reveal helpful information.

How does this apply to tax compliance? Every online seller leaves a digital footprint—on storefront pages, shipping details, domain registrations, payment processors, customer reviews and so on. That public data, when aggregated and analyzed at scale, becomes a powerful compliance tool. By analyzing this data, tax agencies can more accurately understand where significant sales activity is occurring and ensure appropriate oversight and support for compliance efforts.

IVIX was built just for this purpose. IVIX works with tax authorities to transform OSINT into clear, actionable intelligence. Our platform scans vast amounts of public data to identify revenue-generating activity that may not be captured through traditional tax reporting systems. 

These insights don’t require intrusive surveillance or burdensome data requests. They’re hiding in plain sight—ready for agencies equipped to find, interpret, and act on them.

Here are ways IVIX can help tax administrators turn public data and digital footprints into results:

●  Surface Unregistered Sellers: By analyzing publicly available seller profiles, shipping locations, and product listings, agencies can match economic activity to registration records.

●  Detect Revenue Underreporting: Review data like inventory turnover, pricing trends, and customer volume across multiple platforms to build informed estimates of actual sales, and whether thresholds have been met.

●  Identify Operational Footprints: Even if a business operates from a remote location or the addresses of its fulfillment centers, warehouses, etc. aren’t widely known, OSINT can help track its presence across multiple online channels, from its website to social media activity.

●  Surface Incorrect Sales Tax Collection or Remittance: IVIX also has specialized tools that look specifically at sales tax collection: are sellers collecting it, are their products coded correctly, and are they collecting the right amount?

IVIX helps tax authorities convert this vast universe of public data into focused audit leads. Our platform uses AI to identify revenue-generating activity, match it to taxpayer entities, and surface noncompliance.

Turning Opportunity into Action

Amazon Prime Day represents more than just a consumer event—it’s a reminder for tax agencies that they must adapt oversight and enforcement to keep pace with the realities of the digital economy. If sellers can move at digital speed, so must tax enforcement. By tapping into OSINT, tax administrators can better identify and address noncompliance by online sellers across eCommerce platforms. With the right tools and intelligence, tax agencies can ensure that this retail windfall doesn’t turn into a compliance black hole.

Let’s make sure every deal rings up the right tax. Contact us today to learn how we can help your agency stay ahead of the curve and unlock the power of OSINT. Together, we can close the digital tax gap and future-proof your operations.