Selling through a marketplace looks simple — stock goes out, money comes in — and it is the easiest thing in a small business to record wrongly. This page covers the whole cycle.
The one rule: record gross, never net
The marketplace is acting as your agent. Your customer paid the full price. The marketplace then keeps its commission and delivery fee and sends you the rest.
So if a customer pays R628 and R418,70 lands in your bank, your revenue is R628, not R418,70. The R209,30 is an expense you incurred, not income you never earned.
Recording the net figure understates both your turnover and your costs. Three things go wrong:
- VAT registration creeps up on you. Registration becomes compulsory at R1 million of turnover in any 12 months, and turnover means gross. Netting makes you look much further from that line than you are.
- The ITR14 asks for gross turnover. Netting is a misstatement, not a presentation choice.
- You cannot see your margin. Commission is a percentage, delivery is usually a flat fee per order. Netted away, you will never notice that delivery eats 17% of a small sale and 7% of a large one.
The settlement lag, and the account that holds it
Marketplaces pay on a cycle — commonly twice a month. You earn the money when the order is delivered and receive it weeks later. Something has to hold it in between, and that something is a clearing account.
Create an asset account, for example 1150 Marketplace clearing, and tick owed to you on it in Accounting → Chart of accounts. That tick puts it in the "Owed to you" figure on your dashboard, alongside unpaid invoices.
When the order delivers
You know the gross price now. You may not know the fees yet, and you do not need them.
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DR 1150 Marketplace clearing gross sale
CR 4400 Marketplace sales gross sale
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When the remittance arrives
Now the fees are known.
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DR 5020 Marketplace commission (VAT inclusive)
DR 5030 Delivery & courier (VAT inclusive)
DR 1000 Bank net received
CR 1150 Marketplace clearing gross
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The clearing balance is therefore always "sold, but not yet paid out" — a genuine debtor, visible on your balance sheet instead of invisible until the cash lands.
In practice you record the deposit from Banking: import the statement, find the payout and categorise it to the clearing account. Do not categorise it to sales — the income went in when the order delivered, and coding the deposit to income counts the same money twice and leaves the clearing balance stranded for ever.
Watch the balance, it is a control
Clearing should sawtooth: up as you sell, back to roughly nil after each payout. If it keeps climbing, either a deposit was coded somewhere else or the marketplace has deducted something you have not recorded. It is the number that tells you whether the marketplace actually owes you what you think.
The fees, and where each one goes
Keep the per-sale fees separate from the fixed ones. It matters for your gross margin.
| Fee | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Commission | 5020, ticked cost of sales | scales with every sale |
| Delivery / transport | 5030, ticked cost of sales | charged per order |
| Monthly platform or seller fee | 5040, an ordinary operating expense | you pay it whether you sell or not |
Put the fixed monthly fee in cost of sales and your gross margin lurches with volume for no real reason — a quiet month would show a collapsing margin on sales that were just as profitable.
VAT on the fees
Marketplace fees carry VAT. If you are not a registered VAT vendor you cannot claim it, so record each fee at its VAT-inclusive amount. The VAT is simply part of what the service cost you.
If you are registered, split it: the fee to the expense account and the VAT to Input VAT, where it reduces what you owe SARS.
Returns
A return has three separate numbers and they go in three directions:
- Return value — the sale undone. Debit
4410 Sales returns, a revenue account that normally carries a debit balance and reduces your turnover. A return is not an expense; it is a sale that stopped existing. - Reverse commission — commission handed back to you. Credit the commission account; it reduces the expense rather than adding income.
- Return transport fee — what you pay to get the goods back. Debit delivery. This one is a real loss: you paid to ship out and again to ship home, and kept nothing.
The item itself goes back into stock at cost, never at the price it sold for.
Stock
Marketplace selling is reselling, so the stock question matters more here than anywhere else. See Items & stock: hold purchases as inventory and let each sale move its own cost into cost of sales. Expensing stock on purchase works only if you sell everything you buy in the same month, and it hides the one number worth having — what each product actually earns you after fees.
Worth knowing before you scale
Two figures tend to surprise people:
Fees are a bigger share of a small order. Commission is a percentage, delivery is flat. A R41 delivery charge is 17% of a R240 sale and 7% of a R554 one. Cheap items give away far more of their value in shipping than their price suggests.
Your cash is tied up longer than you think. A sale on the 1st paid on the 1st of the next month is 31 days. Add however long the stock sat before selling, and each rand of stock can be committed for well over a month. That lag, not your margin, is usually what limits how fast you can grow.