Amazon payment reconciliation for Indian sellers.

The number that lands in your bank from Amazon is almost never the number you sold. A settlement is a stack of deductions applied to your gross sales, and the only way to know whether that stack is correct is to take it apart order by order.

Why does the payout never match the sales figure?

Your Amazon payout is your gross sales minus a predictable stack of deductions: referral fees, closing or fixed fees, shipping or fulfilment charges, refund reversals, reserves and tax withholdings. A gap between what you sold and what you were paid is not a sign of something wrong; it is how every marketplace settlement works. The problem is that the gap is large and dense, which makes it easy to accept the final credit without reading the lines that produced it. That habit is where money leaks. Most of the stack is knowable in advance, the referral fee is a set percentage for your category, the closing fee follows category and price rules, the shipping cost depends on how the order was fulfilled. Because those are knowable, they are checkable, and the whole point of reconciliation is to check them. You are not looking for a headline error. You are looking for the one order in a hundred where a referral fee ran at the wrong rate, or a return was reversed twice, or a reserve was held and never returned.

The instinct many sellers have is to compare totals: total sales for the period against total payout, decide the difference looks about right, and move on. That instinct is exactly what hides errors. A settlement total can look perfectly reasonable while an overcharge on one order is quietly offset by a missing deduction on another. Totals net out. Per-order reconciliation does not, because it forces every single line to justify itself against the order that created it. This guide walks through each part of the stack, explains how FBA, Easy Ship and self-ship change the maths, and shows the errors that repeat often enough to be worth hunting every settlement.

What actually sits inside an Amazon settlement report?

An Amazon settlement report lists, for the period, your sale proceeds and every charge netted against them before payment: referral fees, closing fees, shipping and fulfilment charges, refunds and reversals, promotional or advertising costs, tax withholdings, and any reserve adjustments. You reach it in Seller Central under Payments, where you can view the summary or download the detailed transaction report. The summary tells you the headline; the detailed report is where reconciliation actually happens, because it breaks the payout down to the order and the transaction. The referral fee is charged as a percentage of the item price and differs by category, which is why two orders of the same rupee value in different categories net different amounts. The closing fee is a smaller fixed charge that also varies by category and price band. Shipping and fulfilment charges are the biggest variable, because they depend entirely on your fulfilment method, covered in detail below. Then come refunds, where a return reverses the original sale and may adjust the fees, and finally tax, where TCS and TDS are withheld under Indian tax rules and reported separately. Each line is explainable. Reconciliation is the discipline of making each one explain itself.

What is the referral fee and how do I check it?

The referral fee is Amazon’s commission on each sale, charged as a percentage of the item price that depends entirely on the product category, and it is the first line you should reconcile because it is both the largest and the most error-prone. Different categories carry different percentages, so a listing placed in the wrong category is overcharged on every single order until the category is corrected. To check it, confirm your product’s correct category, find the referral percentage for that category in Seller Central, and multiply it against the item price. If the settlement line does not match, you have found a real, recoverable error. This is the highest-value check in the whole process, because a wrong rate does not cost you once, it costs you on every order in that listing for as long as the mistake stands. For the full anatomy of the report, our Amazon settlement report guide breaks each line down.

What is the closing fee, and does it change by category?

The closing fee, sometimes called a fixed fee, is a smaller flat charge applied per item that varies by category and price band, and unlike the referral fee it does not scale as a straight percentage of the sale. It is usually predictable once you know your category and price bracket, which makes it an easy reconciliation win: confirm the fee that should apply to your price band, then check the settlement charged exactly that. Errors here are rarer than referral errors, but they do occur, particularly when a product’s price crosses a band boundary or a category is misassigned. Because the amounts are small per order, sellers often skip this line, but small charges applied wrongly across hundreds of orders add up to a real number over a quarter.

How do FBA, Easy Ship and self-ship change the fees?

The referral and closing fees are broadly the same across fulfilment methods, but the shipping and fulfilment costs differ sharply, so the same sale nets a different payout depending on whether it went out via FBA, Easy Ship or self-ship. Under FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon), Amazon stores, picks, packs and ships your inventory, so you pay weight-handling, pick-and-pack and storage fees, and your settlement carries those fulfilment lines. Under Easy Ship, you store the stock and hand a packed parcel to Amazon’s courier, so you pay a shipping fee but no storage or pick-pack. Under self-ship, also called merchant-fulfilled, you arrange your own courier entirely, so the settlement carries no Amazon shipping fee at all. This is a frequent source of reconciliation errors: a self-ship order should never show an Amazon shipping charge, and an Easy Ship order should show exactly one. When a shipping fee does not match how the order actually shipped, that is a line to question. If you run more than one channel, our multi-marketplace daily workflow guide covers keeping the fulfilment picture straight across platforms.

How do returns, refunds and reserves affect the payout?

A return reverses the original sale proceeds and may reverse or retain part of the referral fee, while a reserve temporarily holds a slice of your funds against future refunds; both distort the payout and both must be tracked across settlement periods, not within one. The tricky part is timing. A sale can land in one settlement and its refund in the next, so a period’s payout can look wrong simply because a reversal belongs to an earlier sale. This is precisely why per-order reconciliation across periods beats comparing single-period totals. On reserves, newer accounts or accounts after a spike in claims often see Amazon hold a portion of funds that should release on a rolling basis into later settlements. The reconciliation duty is to confirm held amounts actually come back. A reserve that is deducted and never credited is a genuine discrepancy. When a return involves lost or damaged inventory in Amazon’s fulfilment network, a reimbursement or SAFE-T claim may recover the value; our Amazon SAFE-T claim guide walks through when and how to file.

How do TCS and TDS show up, and why reconcile them separately?

TCS (tax collected at source) and TDS (tax deducted at source) are statutory withholdings Amazon applies under GST and income-tax rules, reported on separate tax statements, and they must reconcile against those statements because they flow directly into your own tax filings. These are not Amazon fees and they are not lost money; they are tax credits you claim back when you file. But if the withheld figure does not match your taxable sale value, the error propagates into your GST and income-tax returns, which is a far more expensive problem to unwind later. Reconcile the tax lines against Amazon’s tax reports every period, keep the statements, and make sure the numbers you carry into filing are the ones Amazon actually withheld. Robnu reconciles your settlement and payment reports so these figures are verified before they reach your accountant, but it does not generate your GST invoices or file your returns, that stays with you and your tax advisor.