Online brand accountants.

Online brand accountants work with direct-to-consumer and marketplace sellers whose revenue lands net of platform fees, whose stock sits in several locations at once, and whose tax exposure follows that stock across borders. The output is contribution margin by channel and by SKU, produced monthly rather than at the year end.

E-commerce accounting requires platform-specific expertise that most generalist firms simply don't have. Shopify Payments settlements arrive net of fees, refunds and disputes, but a clean ledger needs all four separated. Marketplaces (Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Faire) come with facilitator sales tax that's either remitted by the marketplace or owed by the seller depending on the state. International sales trigger OSS / IOSS rules. And underneath it all, real inventory needs proper accounting under IAS 2 or ASC 330.

Get the platform connectors right and the rest follows. We use A2X (or equivalent) for Shopify and Amazon, integrated into your Xero or QuickBooks. We use Avalara or TaxJar for US multi-state sales tax. We track inventory at the SKU level for brands carrying significant stock. And we surface CAC, contribution margin and cohort LTV in your monthly reporting.

We work with e-commerce brands across all our markets: UK-based DTC brands selling into the EU and US, US-based Shopify and Amazon sellers, UAE-based brands targeting the GCC. The mechanics shift by jurisdiction but the discipline is the same.

This page is written for the operator rather than the buyer of a task. The brands we mean sell on their own storefront plus at least one marketplace, hold physical stock, take returns at a rate that materially affects margin, and spend on paid acquisition against a contribution figure they are not confident in. If that describes you, the questions that follow are the ones worth asking your accountant. If you already know what you need done and simply want it delivered, our e-commerce accounting service sets out the scope, the cadence and the price for exactly that work.

The four numbers we build every month are the same regardless of platform: gross revenue before any fee deduction, contribution margin per channel after platform fees, fulfilment and returns, inventory position split by location, and cash conversion from order to settled bank receipt. None of them come from a bank feed. Storefront revenue arrives as a payout that has already netted processing fees, chargebacks and reserve movements. Marketplace revenue arrives net of a longer list still. Getting to gross means pulling settlement files, not statements.

The structural traps are consistent across the sector. Returns are recorded as they are refunded rather than provisioned as they are earned, so a strong November flatters the year and a heavy January destroys it. Inventory is expensed on purchase rather than capitalised, so profit tracks buying decisions instead of trading. Consumer tax is assumed to be the platform's problem, when marketplace facilitator rules cover marketplace sales only, leaving the seller responsible for its own storefront and for registration wherever stock is held, which in the UK is measured on the rolling basis HMRC sets out under register for VAT. Gift cards and store credit sit as revenue when they are a liability until redeemed. We unpick these in that order, because each one distorts the next.

Sellers concentrated on a single platform are usually better served by the platform-specific pages: Shopify accounting for storefront-led brands and Amazon FBA accounting for marketplace-led ones. The ledger structure behind all three is described in our Shopify and Amazon chart of accounts guide. Brands deciding how much to hand over usually start from our full list of accounting services, which sets out each service by what it delivers each month. The platform, sales tax and margin guides we write for sellers are collected on the Accountaire blog.