Payout Is Not Profit
Amazon pays a net lump sum, Shopify reports gross, and neither figure is your margin. Fees, refunds and ad spend hide what you actually kept.
Who we helpE-commerce Sellers
Ecommerce Accountants for UK Online Sellers
Specialist ecommerce accountants for UK sellers on Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy and Vinted. An ecommerce accountant joins every payout, fee and refund into one set of books, so you can see what you actually keep. Fixed monthly fees, and we reply inside 72 hours.
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Sound familiar?
The pain points no one warned you about.
VAT You Cannot See
A rolling threshold, marketplace deemed supplier, reverse charge on platform fees. The exposure builds quietly and the registration backdates.
Books That Never Tie Out
Four channels, four settlement cycles, one bank account. Nothing reconciles, so every figure you plan with is an estimate.
Stock In The Wrong Month
Cost of goods recorded when you paid the supplier makes a good month look terrible and a bad month look fine.
How it works
From first call to full clarity.
01 Free Discovery Call
Thirty minutes on your channels, your volumes and what is currently going wrong. No obligation, no jargon. Your time: 30 minutes.
02 We Handle The Handover
We contact your previous accountant, request the records and notify HMRC as your agent. You sign, we do the rest. Your time: near zero.
03 Onboarded In Five Business Days
We connect your platforms, check the last VAT return and load every deadline into our system. Your time: 15 minutes.
04 It Runs
Books, VAT, year-end and advice, with a profit and loss account by channel you can actually read. Your time: 5 minutes a month.
Free · 30 minutes
What’s included in your Tax Health Check.
Thirty minutes with a qualified accountant. We surface the savings, gaps, and structural issues most accountants miss, no obligation, no sales pitch.
VAT Recovery Scan
Where you have overpaid or under-reclaimed VAT on platform fees, refunds and cross-border sales.
Hidden Fee Analysis
Which fees are eating the margin, channel by channel, and what that costs you over a year.
Structure Review
Whether sole trader or limited company fits your profit level, with the difference set out in pounds.
Deadline Check
Every filing due in the next 12 months, plus anything already late and what it will take to clear it.
Why us
Why choose Zmartly for e-commerce sellers.
01 One View Across Every Channel
Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, Vinted and your own site, reconciled into a single profit and loss account by channel, by SKU and by month.
02 Cross-Border VAT Handled Properly
Registration timing, marketplace deemed supplier, OSS, IOSS and Making Tax Digital, by people who do it every day.
03 Numbers That Match The Bank
Stripe payouts, Amazon disbursements, refund holds and advertising mapped separately, so the bank balance stops surprising you.
The detail
What an ecommerce accountant actually does
An ecommerce accountant joins every payout, fee, refund and import charge from every channel you sell on into one set of books that tells you what you actually kept. A general practice usually cannot, because none of its other clients need it.
That sounds like a small distinction. It is not. If your accountant treats a fortnightly Amazon disbursement as a single sales figure, your margins are a guess, your VAT is probably wrong in one direction or the other, and you will never know which product line is paying for the others.
Five jobs sit behind that, in roughly the order they bite. Reconciling the channels, so gross sales, platform fees, advertising and refunds each get their own ledger line and the bank ties out. Getting the VAT right, from registration timing through to marketplace deemed-supplier rules and the cross-border schemes. Recognising stock in the month the item sells rather than the month you paid the supplier. Telling you what to do about it, quarterly rather than once a year in a PDF. And filing everything on time: year-end accounts, Corporation Tax, VAT returns, Self Assessment and payroll if you have staff.
Around 85 per cent of the businesses we act for sell online. We are a CIMA-regulated practice, our fees are fixed monthly, and we reply inside 72 hours to every message.
Find your marketplace
Every platform breaks in its own way, so each one has its own page here with the detail that matters for it. If you sell on more than one, start with whichever carries most of your revenue. We reconcile the rest into the same set of books either way.
Amazon FBA accountingShopify seller accountingeBay seller accountingEtsy seller accountingVinted seller accounting
Amazon FBA and FBM
Amazon pays you a net lump sum roughly every two weeks, and that figure is not your revenue. Behind it sit gross sales, referral fees, FBA fulfilment fees, monthly and long-term storage, returns processing, reimbursements and, more often than not, advertising netted straight out of the disbursement.
We read the settlement report rather than the bank line, give each of those its own account, and work profit out per SKU instead of per payout. Fulfilment by Merchant changes the cost and VAT profile again, because you hold and ship the stock yourself, and plenty of sellers run FBA and FBM side by side. If most of your revenue runs through Amazon, start there.
Shopify
Shopify reports gross orders. Stripe pays you net of processing fees, on its own schedule. PayPal and Klarna settle differently again, and refunds land days after the sale they reverse. That is why your Shopify dashboard and your bank statement never agree.
We record orders, payouts, Shopify Payments and Stripe fees, chargebacks and refund holds as separate entries, so the bank reconciles and you can see true net revenue per order. Shopify Markets brings its own questions the moment you start shipping into the EU or the United States, and those are better answered before the first order than after it.
eBay
eBay takes final value fees and promoted listing fees, then pays out on the managed payments cycle. The part that catches most of the sellers we onboard is the reverse charge on the platform fees themselves, which has to be accounted for on the VAT return even though no VAT changed hands.
We map each fee type separately, apply the reverse charge treatment, and reconcile the payout cycle against gross sales, so the turnover figure on your return is the one HMRC would expect to see.
Etsy
Listing fees, transaction fees, Etsy Payments processing, Offsite Ads commission and shipping labels all come out before the money reaches you, and Etsy collects VAT on some sales itself. We split each of those out and account for what Etsy has already handled, so nothing is counted twice and nothing is missed.
Etsy is also where the hobby question comes up most often, because a craft business tends to grow for a while before anyone decides it is a business. There is a point at which HMRC treats it as trading, and it is better to know where you stand before a letter arrives than after.
Vinted
Vinted has changed position for a lot of sellers twice over. Vinted Pro turned casual selling into a business account, and the platform now reports seller data to HMRC under the digital platform reporting rules, so what you sold is visible whether or not you declared it.
If you have had a letter, or you are wondering whether you should have registered, start on the Vinted page. We work out whether what you are doing counts as trading, bring earlier years into order if they need it, and file what is genuinely due rather than what a nudge letter assumes.
TikTok Shop, WooCommerce and everything else
TikTok Shop, WooCommerce, Wix, Amazon Handmade, wholesale into retailers, a storefront on your own domain. If you sell on it, we can reconcile it, and most of the sellers we take on run some combination nobody has a template for.
There is no separate page for these yet. Bring the stack to the call and we will tell you how each part connects, which fees hide inside which payout, and where the awkward edges are.
When do you have to register for VAT?
You have to register for VAT once your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or when you expect your taxable turnover to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days.
Two things about that sentence catch sellers out. It is turnover, not profit, and not what lands in your bank. A seller taking £8,000 a month on Amazon is over the line even if fees, advertising and stock leave them a few hundred pounds. We regularly onboard sellers who registered late because they were watching their payouts rather than their turnover.
And it is a rolling 12 months, not your accounting year. The test runs at the end of every month against the previous twelve. You can cross the line in March and have no idea until someone looks in November, by which point the registration is backdated and the VAT is owed on sales you priced without it.
VAT registration thresholds on GOV.UKVAT returns and registration
Cross-border VAT: OSS, IOSS and the deemed supplier
Once you sell outside the UK, VAT stops being one return. Where a marketplace is treated as the deemed supplier it collects the VAT and accounts for it itself, and your return has to reflect that rather than charge it again. Getting that wrong is the commonest error we correct in a new client’s first quarter with us.
Selling goods to consumers in the EU brings the One Stop Shop into play. Low-value goods imported into the EU bring the Import One Stop Shop. Which of those applies depends on where your stock sits and who is the importer of record, and neither is automatic.
We register you where you genuinely need it and nowhere you do not, because every extra registration is another return to file every period from then on. Under Making Tax Digital your UK VAT returns are filed from the software rather than typed into a portal, which is one more reason the bookkeeping underneath has to be right.
Why your payouts never match your sales
Every platform takes its cut at a different stage, and none of them do it in a way that is obvious on a bank statement.
Referral and final value fees come off before you are paid. Fulfilment and storage come off separately. Advertising is often netted out of the disbursement rather than invoiced. Refunds land days after the sale they reverse. Payment processors take a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction. Currency conversion takes another slice if you sell abroad. Any one of those is manageable. All six at once, across four channels, is why the bank balance is always lower than the sales report and never lower by the same amount twice.
Once each of them is a separate line in the ledger, two things happen. Your margins become real, which is usually the first time an owner sees which channel was subsidising the others. And you can see the VAT you are entitled to reclaim on the fees that carry it, which for a multi-channel seller is rarely a rounding error.
Sole trader or limited company?
There is no turnover figure at which you should incorporate. It depends on your profit, how much of it you take out, whether you have a partner to split income with, and what you intend to do with the business.
A limited company can be more tax-efficient once profits are steady, through a mix of salary and dividends. It also brings Corporation Tax, Companies House filing, a separate bank account and more administration. For a seller making a modest profit and taking all of it out to live on, it is often not worth it yet.
Rather than print a figure here that goes out of date, run your own numbers through the calculator and bring the answer to the call. We model both structures against your actual accounts, tell you the difference in pounds, and move you across cleanly if it pays.
Ecommerce tax calculatorSole trader or limited company for online sellers
Bookkeeping across every channel, in one set of books
Your ledger sits in Xero or QuickBooks. Your sales channels connect through A2X or Link My Books, or through a native feed where one exists. Stripe, PayPal, Klarna and Amazon disbursements reconcile against gross sales rather than replacing them.
What comes out is one profit and loss account, split by channel and by month, that ties to the bank. Stock cost lands in the month the item sold. Platform fees sit in their own accounts rather than buried inside a net figure. If you already use Xero or QuickBooks we keep it and tidy it up. If you do not, the licence and the setup are included in your monthly fee.
What it costs, and what you get back
Fixed monthly, rolling, no long contract. Essentials is £129 a month and suits one or two channels with VAT returns, year-end and Self Assessment. Premium Plus starts at £250 a month for multi-channel sellers with higher transaction volume and quarterly advisory. Enterprise starts at £499 a month for complex groups, cross-border registrations and management reporting. All plus VAT. Which plan you land on is set by transaction volume and the number of channels, not by what we think you can pay.
Most owners uncover £1,000 to £3,000 in annual tax savings on the first call, which is usually the whole argument for moving. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if the first month does not do what we said it would, you are not committed to the rest.
If you only want one job done, we do those too. A one-off year-end is £400 for a first-year company and £899 for an established set of accounts, and Premium Plus year-end work is quoted on what is actually involved.
Questions? We’ve got answers
The most common questions.
Yes. Each channel connects through A2X, Link My Books or a native Xero or QuickBooks feed, and we reconcile Stripe, PayPal, Klarna and Amazon disbursements separately from gross sales rather than in place of them. What you end up with is a single profit and loss account split by channel, by SKU and by month, tying to the bank. For most sellers that is the point at which they find out which channel was quietly subsidising the others.
Shopify reports gross orders, Stripe pays you net of processing fees on its own schedule, and refunds hit a different day again, which is why the bank never ties out. We record Shopify orders, Stripe payouts, Shopify Payments fees, chargebacks and refund holds as separate ledger entries, so the bank reconciles and you can see true net revenue per order instead of a net figure with six things buried inside it.
Once your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or when you expect your taxable turnover to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days. It is turnover, not profit, and not the amount that reaches your bank, so a seller taking £8,000 a month is over the line even on thin margins. The 12-month test is rolling rather than tied to your accounting year, which is how sellers cross it in the spring and only find out in the autumn. The thresholds are published on GOV.UK.
Sometimes, and in a particular way. Where the marketplace is treated as the deemed supplier it accounts for the VAT itself, and your return has to reflect that treatment rather than charge the VAT again. There is also the reverse charge on the platform's own fees, which belongs on the return even though no VAT changed hands. Between them, these two are the commonest errors we correct in a new client's first quarter with us.
Selling goods to EU consumers brings the One Stop Shop into play for stock you send from the UK, and low-value consignments imported into the EU bring the Import One Stop Shop. Which applies depends on where your stock sits and who is the importer of record, so neither is automatic. We work that out before registering you for anything, because each registration is a return you then have to file every period from then on.
Generalists are genuinely good at trades and consultancies. They are rarely set up for channel-level fee reconciliation, deemed-supplier VAT, OSS and IOSS, or reading a settlement report, because none of their other clients need it. If your accountant currently treats Shopify or Amazon as one revenue line, you are losing margin visibility and almost certainly some reclaimable VAT. We handle the handover, contact your previous accountant and notify HMRC, so the switch costs you a signature.
Yes. Both carry the same quirk: the supplier cost settles in a different currency and on a different date to the sale, and the place-of-supply rules decide where the VAT is due. We record cost of goods against the order it belongs to, handle the currency conversion, and check the VAT position before it turns into a correction. The result is a true margin per order rather than a gross figure with the supplier cost floating somewhere else in the month.
Xero or QuickBooks as the core ledger, bridged to your sales channels with A2X or Link My Books so Amazon settlements, Shopify payouts and marketplace fees flow in cleanly rather than as one net line. If you already use one of these, we keep it and tidy it up. If you do not, the licence and the setup are included in your monthly fee, so there is nothing extra to buy.
Fixed monthly fees from £129 for Essentials, £250 for Premium Plus and £499 for Enterprise, all plus VAT, set by transaction volume and the number of channels. Bookkeeping, VAT, year-end, tax advice and replies inside 72 hours are all included. Terms are rolling monthly with no long contract, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, and onboarding is usually complete within five business days.
Free · 30 minutes · No obligation
Stop overpaying tax. Start filing in 5 days.
Thirty minutes with a qualified accountant. Most owners uncover £1,000-£3,000 in annual savings on the first call. If we are not the right fit, you walk away with a free tax review on the house.
