Marketplace Sales Reporting

Marketplace sellers get two versions of the truth every month: what the settlement report says happened, and what actually arrived in the bank. The two rarely match line for line — settlements straddle month ends, reserves hold money back, fees come out before you ever see the cash. The gap between the two versions is exactly where reporting errors live.

Reporting marketplace sales properly is mostly a matter of deciding which version to trust. The answer is the settlement report: it is the platform's own account of every order, refund, fee and adjustment. The bank only tells you when the leftovers arrived.

Reading a settlement report

Amazon, eBay and Etsy each format theirs differently, but the anatomy is the same: a settlement period, gross sales for that period, refunds, a long tail of fee types — commission, payment processing, advertising, storage or listing charges — and a net amount paid out. The settlement period almost never lines up with the calendar month, and the payout can land in the bank days after the period closes. Your books should report the sales in the period they happened, with the deposit treated as the settlement of a balance owed to you, not as the income itself.

When the platform collects GST

In some situations, Australian GST law treats the marketplace — as an electronic distribution platform — as the party responsible for GST on sales made through it, most commonly for certain low value imported goods and digital products sold to Australian consumers. Whether that applies to any of your sales depends on what you sell, where it is sold from and who buys it, so confirm the position with your accountant or the ATO rather than assuming the platform has it covered. Two conservative rules of thumb hold regardless: keep the platform's reports showing any GST it collected on your sales, and remember that your sales through a marketplace still generally count toward your own GST turnover when working out whether you need to register (the registration threshold is currently $75,000 for most businesses — check the current ATO figure).

Refunds and chargebacks

Refunds reduce your sales and should appear in the books as refunds, not vanish inside a smaller payout. Chargebacks are harsher: the sale reverses, the goods are usually gone, and the platform often adds a dispute fee. Record the reversal against sales and the fee as an expense, and keep the dispute paperwork — a cluster of chargebacks is both a bookkeeping event and a warning sign worth investigating.

A monthly reconciliation routine

• Download every settlement report covering the month, from every marketplace you sell on.
• Post the settlements — gross sales, refunds, each fee category — into a clearing account per platform, directly or through a connector tool.
• Match the bank deposits against the clearing account until it returns to zero, with any remainder explained by reserves or in-transit settlements.
• Review the exceptions — chargebacks, unusual adjustments, GST the platform reports it collected — while the month is fresh.

What we commonly see go wrong

• Bank deposits reported as sales, understating gross income and erasing fees from the file.
• Settlement periods straddling month end, so sales are counted in the wrong month or missed entirely.
• Assumptions that the platform handles all GST, with nothing kept to show what was or was not collected.
• Reserves treated as lost income instead of a receivable sitting in the clearing account.
• Chargeback fees and dispute outcomes never recorded, so the sales figure quietly disagrees with the platform's records.

A worked example

As an illustration: an eBay seller reports whatever lands in the bank as sales. When the question of GST registration comes up, turnover is assessed from those deposits — which sit well below the gross sales the platform reports, because fees and refunds were netted out before the money arrived. Rebuilt from settlement reports, the gross sales figure is materially higher, and the registration question has a different starting point. Same business, same orders — the only thing that changed was which version of the truth the books were built on.

When to get help

If your sales figure is built from bank deposits, if you sell on more than one marketplace and the file has never tied back to the platforms' own reports, or if you are unsure whether the platform is collecting GST on some of your sales, it is worth having the reporting rebuilt from the settlement data once — and the monthly routine set up so it stays tied out.

The platform says it collects GST on some of my sales — do I still have to do anything?

Keep the platform's reports showing what it collected, and confirm with your accountant how those sales should appear in your own GST reporting. The rules depend on what you sell and to whom, and platform-collected GST on some sales does not remove your obligations on the rest.

Do marketplace sales count toward the GST registration threshold?

Generally yes — sales you make through a marketplace still count toward your own GST turnover, and that turnover is measured on your sales, not on the net payouts you receive. The registration threshold is currently $75,000 for most businesses — check the current ATO figure and your own circumstances.

How should I record a chargeback?

Reverse the sale, record any dispute fee the platform charges as an expense, and keep the dispute correspondence. Do not just let the smaller payout absorb it — chargebacks you cannot see in the books cannot be monitored, and a rising pattern is worth catching early.