Review marketplace and payment fees

Direct answer

For this review, show how Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, payment, fulfillment, and app fees affect net margin by SKU/channel.

Why this question comes up

Marketplace sellers get squeezed by referral fees, fulfillment fees, payment fees, and storage fees. This guide turns that concern into a review that can be repeated with a defined period, consistent inputs, and a visible trail back to the records.

Records to gather

• Marketplace settlement reports at transaction level, not summary
• Payment processor statements with fee breakdown
• Your own sales records for the same period
• Fee schedules for each marketplace and processor
• Chargebacks, disputes, and their associated fees

Review workflow

1. Reconcile settlement to your own sales. Marketplace payouts are net of many deductions. Start from gross sales and account for every deduction down to the deposit.
2. Break out the fee stack. Referral or commission, payment processing, fulfilment, storage, advertising, and refund-handling are separate charges often reported as one net figure.
3. Recalculate against the published schedule. Fee categories vary by product category and change over time. Verify what you were charged matches what should have been charged.
4. Include advertising if it is deducted at settlement. It is a real cost of that channel even when it sits in a marketing budget conceptually.
5. Compute effective fee percentage by channel and SKU. Headline rates rarely match effective rates once the full stack lands.
6. Check chargeback and dispute fees. These carry a fee on top of the lost sale and are easy to miss in a net figure.

What a useful answer should include

• A reconciliation from gross sales to net deposit, itemised
• Each fee type separated rather than a single net deduction
• Effective fee percentage by channel and by SKU
• Verification against the published fee schedule
• Advertising deducted at settlement included in channel cost
• Chargeback and dispute costs shown separately

Common failure modes

• Recording only the net deposit. Revenue is understated and the fee stack becomes invisible.
• Using the headline rate. Effective cost is routinely several points higher once all layers land.
• Excluding settlement-deducted advertising. It understates true channel cost.
• Not verifying against the schedule. Category misclassification by the marketplace can persist for months unnoticed.

Community context

The linked community posts show why people search for this topic and which parts create confusion in practice. They are anecdotal. Use the reference sources and your organization’s policies for accounting treatment, tax, compliance, and final decisions.