Cite as: 505 U. S. 214 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
business function apart from their connection to the soliciting of orders—and those activities that the company would have reason to engage in anyway but chooses to allocate to its in-state sales force.5 Cf. National Tires, Inc. v. Lindley, 68 Ohio App. 2d 71, 78-79, 426 N. E. 2d 793, 798 (1980) (company's activities went beyond solicitation to "functions more commonly related to maintaining an on-going business"). Providing a car and a stock of free samples to salesmen is part of the "solicitation of orders," because the only reason to do it is to facilitate requests for purchases. Contrariwise, employing salesmen to repair or service the company's products is not part of the "solicitation of orders," since there is good reason to get that done whether or not the company has a sales force. Repair and servicing may help to increase purchases; but it is not ancillary to requesting purchases, and cannot be converted into "solicitation" by merely being assigned to salesmen. See, e. g., Herff Jones Co. v. State Tax Comm'n, 247 Ore. 404, 412, 430 P. 2d 998, 1001-1002
5 The dissent states that ancillarity should be judged, not from the perspective of the seller, but from the persective of the buyer. Post, at 237 (test is whether "reasonable buyers would consider [the activities] to be a part of the solicitation itself") (emphasis added); post, at 243 ("The test I propose . . . requires an objective assessment from the vantage point of a reasonable buyer") (emphasis added); post, at 246 (question is whether the activities "possess independent value to the customer") (emphasis added). As explained earlier, see n. 4, supra, this rule inevitably results in a whatever-the-industry-wants standard, despite the dissent's unequivocal disavowal of such a test.
The dissent also suggests that ancillarity should be judged by asking whether a particular challenged activity is "related to a particular sales call or to a particular sales solicitation," post, at 244 (emphasis added). This standard, besides being amorphous, cannot be correct. Those activities that are most clearly not immunized by the statute—e. g., actual sales, collection of funds—would seem to be the ones most closely "related" to particular acts of actual solicitation. And activities the dissent finds immunized in the present case—maintenance of a storage facility and use of a home office—are extremely remote.
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