E-commerce
E-commerce bookkeeping services
Marketplace payouts are net of a dozen deductions. Booking the payout as revenue understates sales and hides every fee.
Marketplace payouts are net of a dozen deductions. Booking the payout as revenue understates sales and hides every fee.
At a glance
E-commerce books go wrong in a specific and predictable way: the deposit that lands in the bank is treated as the sale. It is not. It is what survived after fees, refunds, chargebacks, shipping and reserve holdbacks, and every one of those is information you have just destroyed.
A single marketplace payout can net together sales across a period, referral and fulfilment fees, refunds, chargebacks, promotional rebates and a reserve. Booked as one revenue line, gross sales are understated and the entire cost of selling is invisible.
You cannot compute contribution margin if platform fees are netted out of revenue rather than sitting in cost of sales. Which means you cannot tell whether a product is profitable, and the decision to scale it is being made blind.
Stock is an asset until it sells, at which point it becomes cost of goods sold. Expensing purchases on payment makes a big buying month look catastrophic and the month you sell it look extraordinary, and neither is true.
Economic nexus means sales into a state can create a filing obligation there on volume alone, with no office, staff or stock in it. Thresholds vary by state, and they are tested continuously rather than annually.
Marketplace facilitator rules complicate it further: platforms often collect and remit on your behalf for marketplace sales, but that rarely covers your direct channel, and it does not always remove your own registration or filing obligation. Our e-commerce sales tax page goes into it properly.
Settlement-level reconciliation across every channel, inventory and COGS treated properly, fees where they belong so margin is real, and nexus monitored before it becomes a back-tax problem.