pic: MVRE-109, high-recision shafted encoder

[asid61]

Originally Posted by Mr V

The fact that ebay has or does not have a Federal Tax ID number is irrelevant to this discussion. Ebay is nothing more than a market place or transaction facilitator if you will. The do not own nor sell the products that are sold through them. The same thing goes for the Amazon market place, they facilitate transactions for sellers of products that they don't own. That is why each listing will state "sold and shipped by Amazon" for inventory they own and "sold and shipped by xxx" for products that they do not own.

That by no means indicates that you can not buy products from ebay or Amazon just that their respective Tax ID numbers are not transitive and thus do not mean that the seller qualifies as a Vendor under FRC rules.

On the other hand legitimate businesses that are organized as sole proprietorships are nor required to have a Federal Tax ID number that business will report its income under the sole proprietor's SSN. However having a SSN does not mean that a person would meet the definition of a Vendor under past FRC rules, they would need what ever licenses businesses are required in their locality to actually be a business.

Thank you for the information, that all makes sense.
I tried to fill out the form for running a small business out of my garage for Cupertino. It doesn't look like there are any particular fees to pay (yet), so I might as well just register for a license and get some form of business ID.
In any case, anybody who would have bought one has already been scared off by the possibility of not being able to use it during competition, so it's not even worth doing at this point. Kind of a shame, but getting the license is a good idea in the long run anyway.