But this is about buying from an Oregon company. Question was about having goods delivered to a friend in Oregon, then picking things up from there or the friend mailing things to California.

@gnasher729: As the name suggests, use tax liability is incurred by using (or storing or consuming) the item in California. How you get it there is simply irrelevant.

@MonkeyZeus: Food (at least some types) is exempt - so you may be off the hook for now ;-)

So if your friend in Oregon buys you a nice gift and gives it to you in California, you owe tax on that gift? That seems wrong.

@mascoj - gifts are a different thing, so no.

Okay so Oregon friend buys thing and gifts it to California friend and then California friend gifts the cost of thing to Oregon friend. Boom, no taxes

@mascoj: Your legislators weren't born yesterday. Just because you and your friend say they were gifts, doesn't mean the law has to take your word for it. Determining whether a transfer is a gift is based on the circumstances, and here the circumstances involve an obvious quid pro quo. When you say "it wasn't a purchase, we just gave each other gifts of equal value", the tax authorities will simply laugh at you, and send you a tax bill with penalties.

It's similar in New York. There's actually a part of the income tax form where you are supposed to declare anything you bought out of state. In reality, unless you are talking about something of significant value, you can sleep easily knowing it will never be enforced. It was a big issue for a while before Amazon and the like started handling state and local taxes.

@MonkeyZeus: I don't know how good the quoted summary of the law really is, but note it says if you buy out of state "without tax", not if you buy out of state at a lower sales tax rate. Oregon technically has a state sales tax rate of 0%, which CA probably considers to be "without tax", but you never know your luck. Maybe this CA statute actually is only intended to cover cases where you get an exemption by buying out of state. Also note the summary says "from a business located outside the state" - and in this proposed transaction we could be buying from a CA business, not an OR one.

See updated answer - a notable person was jailed for the million dollar version of this under a similar NY law. And the quoted text is just an example of CA law.

@SteveJessop You owe CA use tax if there has been no CA sales tax assessed (assuming none of the various exemptions apply). They don't care whether Oregon charged you Oregon sales tax.

@Sneftel: yeah, clearly you need more than just the summary to figure this out. For that matter, the quotation doesn't even say anything about the purchased physical object ever being in CA. CA resident makes a purchase in Mexico, immediately uses the item purchased, throws the broken husk of it away in Mexico. Then they have "made a similar purchase from a business located outside the state". But my understanding is that ofc the use has to occur in CA, not just by a CA taxpayer.

@Sneftel: If you paid sales tax to another state, I believe you are able to take a credit against your California use tax. But that makes it immaterial whether Oregon has "no sales tax" (in which case you get no credit) or a "0% sales tax" (in which case you can take a credit in the amount of $0).

From cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/use-tax-table.htm , it seems like you can pay an "estimated use tax" based on your income, rather than actually paying use tax.

Some of the comments here mention ‘friends’ in Oregon, but the question talks about having an address in Oregon, which I interpret to mean the buyer owning a house there themselves. So if I have a house in California and one in Oregon (let’s assume I actively live in both houses) and buy a painting for my Oregon house, then move it to my California house – do I need to pay sales taxes on it when moving it? Does it make a difference if I move it immediately or have had it hanging on the wall in Oregon for five years before deciding it’s a better fit for the California house?

The article about the executive with the paintings mentioned that he never even hung the pictures in NH so in that case it would have made a difference.