Some lawmakers have worried that online tobacco retailers sell their products to underage smokers. But Davoudi says his company pays an extra $2.75 per order for UPS to obtain a 21-year-old's signature upon delivery.
"The average buyer of online tobacco is a 52-year-old woman. It's not kids," Davoudi said. "Inherent in our business model is the fact that we only sell by the carton and most kids don't have that kind of disposable income. And you have to have a credit card to place the order."
The higher tobacco taxes in Georgia could create a boon for black-market cigarettes in stores and online, Davoudi and Rich said.
As an experiment, Brown & Williamson employees Tim Galoppa and Pat Moore recently ordered two cartons from an online site. One carton was fine, but Moore said the other was marked "for export P to be sold outside the U.S. only."
"There are some things on the Internet that are legit, but that carton had to be a black-market product," Moore said.