A marketplace fee is an operating expense. It is not a reduction in your sales price, and it is not Cost of Goods Sold.
That distinction sounds academic until you see what it does to your reports.
Gross, not net
A $100 sale with $13 of fees is $100 of revenue and $13 of expense. Not $87 of revenue.
Both versions arrive at the same profit. They tell you completely different things:
| Net ($87 revenue) | Gross ($100 revenue, $13 expense) | |
|---|---|---|
| Your true sales volume | hidden | visible |
| What the channel costs you | invisible | a line you can watch |
| Fees deductible at tax time | never recorded | recorded |
| Fee rising from 11% to 15% | undetectable | obvious |
The netted version cannot answer "what does selling here actually cost me?" — and that is usually the most valuable question your books can answer.
Fees are not COGS
COGS is what the goods cost. A marketplace fee only exists because a sale happened, and it says nothing about what the item cost you to buy.
Putting fees in COGS collapses two separate problems into one number. When Gross Profit is thin you can no longer tell whether the product is priced badly or the channel is expensive — and those lead to opposite decisions. Keep them apart and the report separates them for you.
Splitting the fee types
Marketplaces charge many different fees, and lumping them into one "Fees" account throws away information you cannot get back.
Worth separating, because each moves for a different reason:
- Commission / final value fees — scale with sales. A rising rate is what matters.
- Fulfillment fees — per unit shipped. Sensitive to product size and weight.
- Storage fees — charged on inventory sitting still. A rising figure means slow stock, not more sales, and it is the one that quietly grows.
- Advertising / promoted listings — discretionary, and the only one you fully control.
- Subscription fees — fixed monthly, unaffected by volume.
"Storage fees doubled while sales were flat" is an actionable sentence. "Fees went up" is not.
SalesImporter creates these accounts per channel as it syncs, so the split happens without anyone categorizing anything by hand.
The check that proves it worked
Fees recorded properly do not just appear as expenses — they reduce what the marketplace owes you.
So open the register for your marketplace receivable. Sales push it up, fees and refunds pull it down, payouts clear it. If its balance matches what the marketplace says it is holding, then every fee you were charged made it into your books.
If it does not match, a fee went missing — and your profit currently looks better than it is.