If your local e-commerce business is selling across more than one online marketplace – say TikTok Shop, Amazon and Walmart, with maybe some YouTube revenue to boot – you’ve probably noticed discrepancies between sales data and the money that actually lands in your bank account. Managing records for multi-channel e-commerce is tricky, because of all the different deductions and fees each platform requires. Most bookkeepers avoid working with clients that cross-sell on different apps when they can, but All About Businesses actually specializes in multi-channel e-commerce accounting and bookkeeping services! By hiring a professional, you can stop drowning in numbers that never match up and get a big-picture look at how your business is really performing.
Here’s Why Your Deposits Don’t Match Your Sales
You sell something online for $100, but you do not get $100 deposited in your account. Every platform, from TikTok Shop to eBay and PayPal, has to take its share for hosting your products and enabling sales with its tools. Before you get paid for your sales, merchant platforms will deduct:
- Referral and selling fees
- Fulfillment fees (if they ship for you)
- Advertising costs for boosted products
- Refunds and returns
There are also holds, where some platforms will sit on your money temporarily before distributing it to you. One single bank deposit might include the total amount for hundreds of items sold, minus a dozen of these fees, all compiled from a random date range. We have seen e-commerce business owners take the easy route of simply recording the entire deposit as “income,” but your revenue numbers get shortchanged without the visible context of what you’re spending on host sites. Those fees need to be recorded in your books, along with every sale, if you’re going to have an accurate picture of your profits.
Each marketplace has a slightly different fee structure, payout schedule, and reporting metrics. Reconciling each channel you want to sell on takes work, and that’s often where many business owners phone it in. Fortunately, there are bookkeeping professionals out there who can help you clean up your records if you have been struggling to manage multi-channel sales data. All About Businesses helps local e-commerce owners keep up with the demand of fulfilling orders, marketing, and growing their brand online by handling the bookkeeping tasks. Here’s how we keep multi-channel books clean:
- Recording gross sales, not net deposits
- Reconciling each channel to its own payout report
- Matching payouts to the right period
- Tracking inventory and cost of goods across channels
We want you to know what each platform is really costing you, which platforms are the most profitable, and real profit margins based on production costs, fees, and the money you actually earned. Our team offers financial reporting to every client, providing crucial evidence to secure funding for expansion, and valuable insights that can help you steer pricing, production, and strategize for upcoming sales.
The Nebulous Variable: Taxes
We can’t talk about e-commerce without touching on the location-based factor that makes multi-channel selling risky and complicated: sales tax. When you sell into multiple states – which is inevitable on a national retail platform – you may not know all the tax laws for states you have never even been to. Keeping track of every state’s policies and regulations is a lot of information to just have on hand – that’s why hiring an accountant is a no-brainer for online retail brands.
Many sellers assume they’ll be fine because a platform “handles” sales tax on every purchase, only to discover obligations they didn’t know they had. This is the single most common – and most expensive – blind spot in multi-channel e-commerce, and it’s a gap we aim to fill by offering professional accounting and bookkeeping services.
Piece Together Your Numbers
At All About Businesses, working with multi-channel sellers is one of our specialties. Our experts have experience with TikTok Shop, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube, PayPal, eBay, Facebook, and beyond – handling the reconciliation, fee tracking, payout timing, and the multi-state tax complexity that comes with selling everywhere.
Our firm serves businesses all over the Pacific Northwest, with personalized service from a bookkeeper who knows you by name. Our team checks in with clients regularly, always with a real person – not a call center or AI system. Whether your e-commerce brand is just getting started or has been generating between $1 and $12 million in annual revenue, we want to hear from you! No business is too niche, too small (or big), or has too many sales channels to be eligible to work with us! Catching up on messy books is squarely in our wheelhouse, so get in touch with our experts today to find out how we can help you start seeing real numbers across every channel.
