QantivE-commerce accounting

Marketplaces

Amazon FBA accounting: what has to be handled

Amazon is the platform furthest from a conventional set of books. It collects on your behalf, deducts roughly ten families of fees, holds your inventory, and moves it between countries without asking.

MarketplacesUpdated 13 October 20263 min read

The payout is not revenue

An Amazon payout is a period balance. It bundles sales, fees, refunds and adjustments from the cycle, and it lines up neither with a calendar month nor with the dates of the sales it settles. Two consequences, both of which matter.

First, revenue has to be rebuilt from the transaction reports, not from the bank statement. Second, the cut-off has to be handled: at closing, part of the sales already made has not yet been paid out. That is a receivable from Amazon, and it belongs on the balance sheet.

The fee families to keep apart

Collapsing every deduction into one "Amazon fees" line is the most common mistake. It makes per-product margin impossible to compute and hides the items that are drifting. Each family follows its own logic and moves with different variables.

What should be tracked separately
FamilyNatureWhat a jump signals
Referral feePercentage of price, varies by categoryA category change or a shift in product mix
FBA fulfilmentPer unit, driven by weight and dimensionsRepackaging, or a move into another size band
Monthly storageDriven by volume occupied and by seasonOver-ordering
Long-term storagePenalty on dormant unitsStock to write down, well before closing
AdvertisingAcquisition cost, separate from platform feesNet margin eroding at flat revenue
Returns and refundsAn earlier sale undoneA product or listing problem
ReimbursementsCompensation for lost or damaged unitsInventory discrepancies nobody caught

On which account to use The ledger treatment depends on the analysis of each flow and on the firm's own conventions; there is no single universal mapping from an Amazon fee label to an account. What is not negotiable is the separation: an aggregated line cannot be taken apart afterwards.

Stock, and why it becomes a VAT problem

Under FBA your goods are held by a third party, spread across fulfilment centres, and moved at Amazon's initiative. At closing you have to establish quantity and value, reconcile discrepancies against reimbursements received, and assess write-downs on dormant units — long-term storage fees are the most reliable signal there. The detail is in the inventory valuation guide.

The expensive discovery is elsewhere. When stock is transferred into another member state, for example under a pan-European programme, the movement is a transfer of goods that creates VAT obligations in the country of arrival, and the one-stop shop does not cover them. See the EU VAT, OSS and IOSS guide.

Turning on a pan-European programme is a logistics decision that triggers tax obligations in every country of storage.

Further reading