A traditional sale is simple. You sell something, you record revenue, you record the cash that comes in, and you move on.
An ecommerce order is not simple. The marketplace that hosts your order slides a chain of events between the sale and the money that actually lands in your bank account. Fees are deducted, taxes are collected on your behalf, refunds move money around, and inventory is pulled from warehouses you may not even own.
None of this shows up in a single accounting entry. Each event is its own economic fact, and each fact needs its own accounting treatment.
One order is many events
A single order can create all of the following:
| Event | What actually happens | Accounting effect |
|---|---|---|
| Order and sale | The customer buys; the marketplace confirms the order. | Revenue recognised for accounting at the selling price. |
| Marketplace charges | The marketplace deducts fees, commission, and logistics charges. | Fees recorded as selling or operating expenses. |
| GST events | GST is charged on the sale and on several charges. | GST collected and input/output GST tracked for return data. |
| TCS / TDS | The marketplace deducts tax at source for eligible sales, and TDS applies to certain marketplace payments. | Tax liabilities and receivables recorded. |
| Refunds and returns | The customer returns; the marketplace reverses some or all of the sale. | Revenue reversal, charge reversals, and inventory-in accounting. |
| Settlement | The marketplace settles a net amount for the period. | A settlement receivable vs the amount received. |
| Payout | The net amount is paid to your bank. | Bank matched against settlement receivable. |
| Inventory out | Stock leaves fulfilment stock. | Cost of goods sold and stock movement recorded. |
| Stock transfers | Stock moves between warehouses. | A warehouse-wise stock movement, not a sale. |
Multiply that by thousands of orders a month, and the accounting surface grows far beyond what a sales register can describe.
Why the events don’t arrive together
The second complication is timing. The events for a single order do not reach you at the same time, from the same source, or in the same format.
- The sale event arrives from the marketplace order feed.
- Fee and tax data usually arrives with the settlement report.
- Settlement and payout arrive separately, and a settlement pools hundreds of orders.
- Returns arrive later, sometimes weeks after the original sale.
If you reconcile an order by expecting the sale, the fees, and the cash to arrive together, the books never quite balance. The sale exists today, the settlement arrives in a week, and a refund arrives after that.
What “keeping the books” has to mean for ecommerce
Because of all this, ecommerce accounting is not just recording sales. It is:
- Order-wise accounting — each order produces a complete set of entries, not a daily sales total.
- GST-wise accounting — tax data is captured per order and per charge, so returns data can be reconstructed.
- Marketplace-wise accounting — deductions and charges are grouped so you can see what the platform actually cost you.
- Warehouse-wise accounting — inventory and stock transfer events are tracked at the location level.
- Settlement awareness — receivables from marketplaces are tracked and matched against payouts.
Entries also have to be posted into an ERP in a form the ERP can actually process — with the right ledgers, tax accounts, and GST heads for Tally, SAP, or Zoho.
The bottom line
The order is the smallest unit of truth in ecommerce finance. Every other number — profitability, GST, cash received, inventory position — is derived from the events that order generates.
That is why ecommerce accounting needs an accounting layer rather than a sales register. The order has to be decomposed into its events, the events have to be reconciled, and the reconciled story has to land in your ERP as entries, not summaries.
DeepEcom is built around exactly that flow: connect the marketplaces, understand every order as a set of accounting events, reconcile the money, and post detailed accounting into your ERP.