When a marketplace pays you, it does not pay you for an order. It settles a net amount for a period, pooling sales, refunds, charges and taxes across many orders into one number.
Living with that net number is why reconciling ecommerce payments feels hard.
What a settlement contains
A single settlement line can bundle:
- Sales value for orders in the period.
- Commission, fixed fees, logistics and other charges.
- Refunds and their fee reversals.
- GST collected on sales and on charges.
- TCS / TDS where applicable.
- Adjustments, corrections, and clawbacks.
The marketplace reports the breakdown — but it understands the breakdown in terms of its own order and settlement data.
The reconciliation problem, stated precisely
On one side you have “what you expected”: orders sold, at their selling price, minus what you know you owe in charges. On the other side you have “what you received”: bank deposits from settlements.
Reconciliation is closing the gap between the two, item by item, until:
- Every expected receivable has a matching settlement.
- Every settlement has a matching bank deposit.
- Every difference — a charge you did not anticipate, a refund, TDS, a correction — is identified and explained.
When nothing is left unexplained, the marketplaces, your books, and your bank all agree.
What usually causes the gap
| Difference | Cause |
|---|---|
| Fees you did not anticipate | Charges appear in settlements, not in the order feed. |
| Refunds and reversals | Returns arrive after the original settlement. |
| TCS / TDS | Tax withheld per marketplace rules. |
| Exchange and payment processing | Bank-level differences on the payout. |
| Corrections and clawbacks | Marketplace adjusts prior period errors. |
| Settlement lags | Orders settle in a later period than the sale. |
None of these are “losses” in themselves. They are timing and classification differences — but they have to be visible and explained, not absorbed into a net total.
How to actually reconcile at scale
At one or two orders a day, you can read a settlement line by line. At hundreds or thousands of orders, the same process has to be computed:
- Import settlement and payout data from each marketplace.
- Link settlement lines back to the orders they belong to.
- Match expected receivables against settlements.
- Match settlements against bank deposits.
- Flag the residue — differences that no rule produced — for a human to review.
The outcome is a position where receivables, settlements, and bank all reconcile, and the residue is exactly zero or fully explained.
What reconciliation makes possible further downstream
A reconciled view is the input accounting needs. Once every event is explained at order level, GST-wise and warehouse-wise accounting can be produced from trustworthy data, and ERP entries can be posted without guesswork.
DeepEcom treats reconciliation not as a spreadsheet task but as the engine that turns raw marketplace data into clean accounting data.