E-commerce accountants · Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop
Your real margin lives in five places at once: the marketplace, the ad account, the stock system, the payment processor and the books. We join them, and a qualified accountant reads what they say together.
The net payment trap
A marketplace collects the full price, takes its fees and pays you the difference days later. Your bank sees only that deposit, so revenue is understated, the fees disappear and VAT is worked out on the wrong number.
| Amazon deposit | £850.00 |
| Recorded as revenue | £850.00 |
Fees invisible. VAT on the wrong base. Profit per product impossible.
| Gross sales, net of VAT | £916.67 |
| VAT collected | £183.33 |
| Referral fees | −£120.00 |
| FBA fulfilment | −£85.00 |
| Storage | −£15.00 |
| Advertising | −£30.00 |
| Paid into your bank | £850.00 |
Illustrative example. The same £850 deposit hides £250 of fees and £1,100 of sales, and the gross figure is the one HMRC already holds.
The compliance position
Amazon, eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop and other platforms collect your sales figures and report them to HMRC under the digital platform reporting rules.
Sole traders over this level of turnover have been in Making Tax Digital since April 2026, falling to £30,000 in 2027 and £20,000 in 2028. Turnover, not profit.
How long HMRC keeps your postponed import VAT statements available. Miss them and the evidence for your reclaim is gone.
Books built from net deposits do not match what HMRC holds. That is no longer a question of tidiness. Had a letter from HMRC? Talk to us before you reply.
Where we are different
Marketplace bookkeeping, VAT and profit by channel are what you should expect from any specialist. These four are what most still find difficult.
Channel data and the ledger rarely agree to the penny. Before an answer reaches you it is checked against your accounts, and when it will not tie, you are told why, with the difference stated, instead of a confident wrong number.
Not a blended margin that hides the losers. For each product we work out what it keeps after fees, fulfilment, returns and landed cost, and so the advertising return it must reach just to break even.
We collect your C79 certificates and postponed VAT statements every month, match each import to its customs entry so nothing is claimed twice, and carry a ready-to-reclaim figure into your VAT return.
Stock that has stopped selling is money already spent. We show dead stock in pounds and as a share of your stock value, with its age, and tie it back to what your balance sheet says it is worth.
Same advertising return, opposite results
ROAS compares sales with ad spend, but much of each sale belongs to the marketplace, your supplier and HMRC. What matters is what is left after them.
That only shows up when the margin is worked out product by product, which is exactly the work most firms skip. Test one of your own products.
| Per unit, Amazon UK | Premium bundle | Commodity refill |
|---|---|---|
| Price paid | £59.99 | £17.99 |
| Kept after fees, stock and returns | £21.55 | £1.89 |
| Ad spend at ROAS 4.0 | −£15.00 | −£4.50 |
| Profit per unit | £6.55 | −£2.61 |
| ROAS needed to break even | 2.8 | 9.5 |
Illustrative model using published Amazon UK fee rates (15% referral) and VAT at 20%. Not a client result.
Your platform
Your books stay in your own Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, in your name. Everything we build sits alongside them, and the answers come from all your systems together. See how it works.
Settlement journals for every channel, receipt capture and a cash forecast included. A one-off set-up fee is spread over your first three payments, and waived for our first five e-commerce clients.
If you sell on a marketplace, yes. Marketplaces pay you net of fees, so an accountant working from bank deposits will understate your sales and misstate your VAT, and your books will not match the gross figures platforms now report to HMRC.
Yes. We prepare balanced journals from your marketplace settlements, with every fee on its own line, and a qualified accountant reviews them before they are posted. There is no separate subscription per channel.
Yes, so you do not have to change software to work with us. One limit worth knowing: Sage does not share tracking categories through its connection, so Sage clients get everything except channel-level profit and loss built from them.
Every figure is held in sterling with the original currency and the exchange rate kept alongside it, so a conversion cannot quietly overstate your sales.
Yes. We work out when trading began, rebuild your gross sales from settlement data, and prepare a reply with records that agree with what the platform reported. Take advice before you reply.
Nothing. They stay in your own accounting software in your name, with your history. There is no minimum term.
A free discovery call to look at your channels, fees and margins, and a straight answer on what your current set-up is not showing you.
