Amazon reports a lot of numbers and almost none of them are the number you want. Sales in Seller Central is not revenue. The deposit in your bank is not profit. The fee summary is not a complete list of what Amazon charged you. These are the questions that come up most often when a seller sits down to make the books match reality, answered against Amazon’s own published figures as of August 2026.

Is the deposit in my bank account my revenue?

No. It is gross sales minus refunds, minus referral fees, minus fulfilment and storage fees, minus advertising, plus or minus reserve and settlement adjustments.

Posting that deposit to revenue is the single most common error in Amazon books. It understates sales, hides every fee category, and makes your gross margin percentage arithmetically meaningless because the denominator is wrong. Post gross sales to revenue and give each deduction its own expense account.

What does Amazon actually charge?

Two mandatory charges apply to every seller: the selling plan fee and the referral fee. Per Amazon’s published pricing, the Individual plan costs $0.99 per item sold and the Professional plan costs $39.99 per month.

Referral fees vary by category and carry a minimum of $0.30 in most categories. Flat examples: Home and Kitchen, Toys and Games, Sports and Outdoors, Office Products, Tools and Home Improvement, Lawn and Garden, Footwear, Eyewear and Mattresses all sit at 15 percent. Consumer Electronics, Computers, full-size Appliances and Video Game Consoles are 8 percent. Automotive and Powersports and Business, Industrial and Scientific Supplies are 12 percent. Tires are 10 percent. Gift Cards are 20 percent. Amazon Device Accessories are 45 percent.

Everything else is optional and separately documented: Fulfillment by Amazon, storage, Amazon Ads, Multi-Channel Fulfillment, currency conversion and account services.

Why does my blended fee percentage keep moving?

Because several large categories are tiered by price, so your effective rate changes as your price points move even when Amazon changes nothing.

Clothing and Accessories runs 5 percent at or under $15.00, 10 percent above $15.00 through $20.00, and 17 percent above $20.00. Baby Products and Beauty, Health and Personal Care both step from 8 percent to 15 percent at $10.00. Grocery and Gourmet steps at $15.00. Electronics Accessories charge 15 percent on the portion up to $100.00 and 8 percent above. Furniture charges 15 percent up to $200.00 and 10 percent above. Compact Appliances charge 15 percent up to $300.00 and 8 percent above. Lawn Mowers and Snow Throwers charge 15 percent up to $500.00 and 8 percent above. Jewelry charges 20 percent up to $250.00 and 5 percent above. Watches charge 16 percent up to $1,500.00 and 3 percent above.

A $19.99 shirt and a $20.99 shirt sit in different bands. Run a promotion that drops a garment from $21 to $19 and your referral rate falls from 17 to 10 percent, which is worth more than the discount cost you. Modelling Amazon fees as one blended percentage will be wrong on every SKU near a threshold.

Are there fees that do not look like fees?

Yes, and the media closing fee is the one that catches people. Books, DVDs, music, software and video carry 15 percent plus a $1.80 per item closing fee, which is flat and therefore brutal on low-priced items.

Two more worth knowing. Pet Supplies are 15 percent except veterinary diets at 22 percent, a seven-point difference inside one category. And Amazon calculates referral fees on the item’s total price, which includes list price plus shipping and any gift-wrap charges. Sellers who price low and ship expensive are paying referral fees on the shipping.

How should I handle FBA fees?

As their own expense line, split from referral fees, and with every rate assumption in your model carrying a date. Amazon publishes fulfilment fee changes with effective dates on Seller Central, and the rate cards have moved more than once in the past two years.

The practical discipline is to write “as of the 2026 fee schedule” next to any fulfilment number in your model and set a calendar reminder to recheck it when Amazon announces a change. Anyone still carrying a 2024 fulfilment cost into a 2026 margin calculation is working from fiction. Amazon’s Revenue Calculator at sellercentral.amazon.com is the authoritative place to check a specific product rather than a blog’s summary table.

When do I recognise the revenue?

When the sale occurs, not when the settlement pays out. Amazon settles on a schedule that will not align with your month end, so there is always a receivable sitting between the last sale of the month and the first payout of the next.

Create a clearing account. Recognise the sale on order, debiting the clearing account. When the settlement pays out, debit the bank, credit the clearing account, and post fees and refunds along the way. The clearing balance at month end should equal exactly the settlements in transit. Anything else is an error you have just found.

What is the right way to calculate cost of goods sold?

Units shipped multiplied by the actual landed cost of those specific units, in the period they shipped. A percentage of revenue is an assumption, and assumptions cannot surface the cost movements you need to see.

Landed cost is unit price plus inbound freight plus duties and tariffs plus customs brokerage plus prep and inspection. Importers have seen the duty component change substantially since the de minimis exemption for shipments valued at $800 or less was suspended, so a landed cost figure set before that change is understating your cost per unit and overstating your margin.

Why does my Seller Central sales number not match my books?

Usually one of four reasons: the date ranges differ, one figure is net of refunds and the other is not, one includes tax collected by Amazon as a marketplace facilitator and the other does not, or the reports use different time zones.

Check those four before assuming a sync failure. Marketplace facilitator tax is the one people miss most: Amazon collects and remits it, so it should never appear in your revenue and never touch your bank account, but it does appear in some Seller Central reports.

Do I owe sales tax on Amazon sales?

For most US marketplace sales, Amazon collects and remits as the marketplace facilitator, so the obligation sits with them rather than with you. Your own website sales are a separate matter and remain your responsibility.

Registration and threshold rules vary by state and change regularly, and some states still require registered sellers to report facilitated sales and then claim a deduction. Check with your state’s department of revenue and a tax professional rather than relying on a software default or a forum post.

What reports should I be reconciling every month?

Three. The settlement report, which is the authoritative record of what Amazon paid and why. The FBA inventory reconciliation, which catches lost and damaged units Amazon owes you for. And your own clearing account, which catches everything the first two miss.

Age anything sitting in the clearing account past one settlement cycle. Stale clearing balances are the most reliable early warning available in ecommerce books, and they almost always resolve to a duplicated refund, an unrecorded chargeback, or a settlement split across two bank lines.

At what point does this stop being a spreadsheet job?

Somewhere between one and three thousand orders a month, depending on how many marketplaces you run and whether you carry inventory. Below that a disciplined bookkeeper holds it together. Above it, the fee logic alone outruns manual effort.

The tooling splits into two categories. Settlement journal tools such as A2X and Link My Books make revenue and fees accurate and start around US$29 per month. Inventory-aware platforms such as ConnectBooks and Webgility add cost of goods sold, landed cost allocation and SKU-level profit reporting at higher price points. Which you need depends entirely on whether your cost of goods sold is currently a calculation or a guess. If it is a guess, the cheaper category will not fix your actual problem.