Ecommerce & Amazon Sellers

Accounting for online sellers — Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy and everything multichannel — where the bank feed shows settlements, not sales, and the VAT depends on which platform sold what to whom, where.

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Ecommerce breaks ordinary bookkeeping quietly: platforms deposit net settlements that bundle sales, fees, refunds, reserves and advertising into single figures; inventory sits in warehouses at values nobody reconciles; marketplace VAT rules make Amazon liable for some of your sales and you for others; and sellers routinely discover their 'profitable' store was losing money once returns, storage fees and true landed costs were counted.

Acumon builds ecommerce accounting that tells the truth: settlement data unpicked back to gross sales and every fee, inventory and margins tracked by channel and SKU family, the VAT map right across platforms and borders, and numbers that answer the only questions that matter — what actually makes money, and where the cash went.

Settlement Reconciliation: the Core Problem

Amazon and the platforms pay you summaries: a fortnight's sales minus referral fees, FBA fees, refunds, chargebacks, advertising and reserve movements, landing as one deposit. Books built on bank feeds record those deposits as 'sales' and lose everything — gross revenue, fee visibility, refund rates. We build the reconciliation from settlement reports into your cloud accounting, using the ecommerce connectors that work and avoiding those that double-count, so your accounts show what was sold, what the platforms took, and why the deposit was the size it was.

Inventory, Landed Cost and Real Margins

Ecommerce profit lives or dies on unit economics, and unit economics die on lazy cost data: stock valued at supplier invoice while freight, duty and import handling vanish into overheads, storage and long-term FBA fees ignored, returns' true cost uncounted. We establish landed cost properly, keep inventory reconciled between platform reports and the ledger, and produce margin analysis by channel and product family — which is routinely where sellers discover a hero SKU is subsidising a portfolio of quiet losers.

VAT Across Platforms and Borders

Marketplace VAT is genuinely intricate: platforms are deemed suppliers for some transactions (notably overseas sellers' UK sales), you remain liable for your own-site and many domestic sales, EU consumer sales run through OSS and IOSS, and import VAT is a cashflow choice via postponed accounting. Getting the map wrong produces double-declared or undeclared VAT at scale — and HMRC receives marketplace data directly. Our ecommerce VAT specialists build the channel-by-channel map and run the filings; the full detail lives in our dedicated ecommerce VAT service.

Scaling, Funding and Exit

Ecommerce businesses hit corporate milestones fast: incorporation early (product liability alone argues for it), VAT registration often within the first year, management accounts as advertising spend and cashflow start needing weekly attention, then funding or aggregator interest — where diligence-ready numbers and clean channel P&Ls directly move valuation. We run the arc: structure at the start, reporting through growth, and preparation when someone offers to buy the store you built.

What You Get With Acumon

Settlement reports reconciled to gross sales, fees and refunds — every channel
Inventory and landed costs tracked properly, margins told honestly
Channel and SKU-family profitability reporting
Marketplace VAT mapped channel by channel with filings run in-house
OSS/IOSS and postponed import VAT for cross-border sellers
Cloud accounting with ecommerce connectors that actually reconcile
Cashflow forecasting for inventory buys and advertising cycles
Diligence-ready numbers when funding or acquirers arrive

Why Acumon for Ecommerce & Amazon Sellers?

Ecommerce VAT specialists in-house, several previously with HMRC
Dedicated Xero, QuickBooks and Sage teams with ecommerce connector experience
All 90 of the firm's professionals are based in the UK
Due diligence and exit specialists for when the aggregators call

Get a Fixed-Fee Quote

Tell us what you need and we'll come back within one business day with a clear scope and a fixed price — no hourly-rate surprises. Call 020 8567 3451 or use the form and we'll be in touch.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Why don't my Amazon deposits match my sales figures?

Because deposits are settlements, not sales: each one nets a period's gross sales against referral and FBA fees, refunds, advertising costs, occasional reserves Amazon holds back, and timing cutoffs that split weeks across deposits. A store doing £40,000 of monthly sales might see £26,000 of deposits and, without reconciliation, book the wrong revenue and no fee visibility at all. Unpicking settlements back to their components is the foundational task of ecommerce accounting — everything else, from VAT to margins, sits on it.

Amazon collects VAT on some of my sales — so is my VAT handled?

Only for the transactions where legislation makes Amazon the deemed supplier — chiefly overseas sellers' UK sales and certain imported consignments. UK-established sellers' domestic sales typically remain their own liability, as do own-website orders and B2B sales, and sellers misreading the boundary under-declare on some channels while some double-declare on others (that VAT is recoverable — we regularly reclaim it going back up to four years). The channel map has to be built properly once, then maintained as your mix changes.

How should I account for inventory I haven't sold yet?

Stock is an asset until sold — buying £30,000 of inventory is not a £30,000 expense, which is why cash-basis thinking makes good months look terrible and vice versa. Proper accrual accounting matches cost of goods to the sales they generate, values stock at true landed cost, and provides for the slow-moving lines every seller accumulates. It is also what lenders, and eventually acquirers, require. The practical burden is small once the system is set up: platform inventory reports feed the ledger, and the reconciliation runs monthly.

At what point does an ecommerce side hustle become a real tax problem?

Earlier than most sellers think, on two separate clocks: income tax obligations start once trading income passes the £1,000 trading allowance — and platforms now report seller data to HMRC automatically, which has generated waves of nudge letters — while VAT arrives when rolling 12-month turnover crosses the registration threshold, counted on figures many sellers misjudge. Crossing either line unprepared is expensive; crossing both retroactively, during an HMRC enquiry, is the bad version. If you are growing, get the structure right now.

Get in Touch

Ready to Sort Your Ecommerce & Amazon Sellers?

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