Officials have said such a tax would help to “shift the balance” between the rise in online spending and the reduction in visitors to physical shops.
With high-street retail businesses already suffering prior to the pandemic, Covid-19 has dealt a deadly blow to many firms, with a record number of shops disappearing from shopping locales across the country in the first half of 2020.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s UK sales soared last year to a record £19.4bn as people trapped at home were forced to purchase online. Despite this, the amount of taxes paid by the firm will only have minimally increased due to a complex tax avoidance scheme that it has implemented using Luxembourg as its main hub, Paul Monaghan, chief executive of Fair Tax Mark has claimed.
Delivery firms such as Deliveroo and online retailer Asos were also among those to see profits spike during the lockdowns of the past 12 months.
But the newly proposed levy on online shopping could help to stem the...