One of the most powerful things about eCommerce is the ability to sell to customers all around the world. Yet one of the most challenging aspects of that is dealing with all the different currencies and the record keeping that some with that.
Fortunately, Seller Ledger is excited to announce the availability of multi-currency support for eCommerce merchants.
The challenges
To help illustrate the financial complexity, let’s take the example of a North American Amazon seller. When you sell on Amazon to customers in Canada and Mexico, Amazon treats all of those transactions separately from your US-based sales. They issues payouts for those sales (minus expenses) in their native currencies. The also provide their “Activity reports” in those native currencies. This creates a couple of interesting challenges:
1. Reconciling payouts to bank deposits
Even though Amazon issues payouts in their native currencies, when they hit your bank account, you will see them show up in US dollars. But how do you know which deposit goes with the corresponding payout from Amazon? How to do reconcile a payout of $2,316.43 MXN to a deposit of $123.80 USD?
2. Reporting on your business in a single currency?
Even if you can figure out how to match foreign currency payouts to US dollar deposits, how do you look at a single profit and loss statement (or other financial report) that shows an apples-to-apples comparison of sales and expenses?
How Seller Ledger handles foreign currency transactions
Seller Ledger now uses currency exchange rates to translate foreign currency amounts to US dollars. To see this in action, simply click into your account from the dashboard and scroll down to any non-US transactions, and you’ll see them in both USD and the original native currency underneath:
And when you find a payout, we provide you with even more details. Click “expand” next to a payout that you see in your marketplace account and you’ll see it matched to a deposit in your linked bank account:
What about differences from the exchange rate?
That’s an excellent question and we’re so glad we brought it up:) Because exchange rates change all the time, and Amazon doesn’t provide the exact rate used at the time of each transactions, we use the daily “spot rate” to convert amounts from their native currencies to US dollars. And discrepancies end up going under a new category: Foreign Exchange Gain or Loss. This category rolls up to Line 27a: Other expenses on the Schedule C tax form. It will show as a negative number of you lost money overall on the conversion (and as a positive number if you were fortunate enough to benefit from the conversion.
As with many brand-new features, we have released this functionality in a “beta” status, meaning there may be bugs or edge cases that we don’t yet support well. But as with everything else we release, we make updates quickly based on customer feedback. So please let us know.
All included…at no additional cost
Unlike other accounting platforms (ahem, Quickbooks), who may require a higher tier to access multi-currency, and STILL require you to use a third party connector like A2X in order to handle the reconciliation, Seller Ledger just handles it within the software, at the same price as your normal plan. No forced upgrades. No additional software subscriptions. Just a single, affordable solution. So decide for yourself which accounting software works best for Amazon sellers.
Amazon’s announcement of a new 3.5% fuel surcharge is a whopper of a hit for Amazon sellers’ profits. It sounds expensive as a cost taken out of your top line, but it is even worse when considered in the context of a seller’s net profits.
Prior to the surcharge, there were already a number of different Amazon fee types that could be taken out of a seller’s revenue. Some of these fees are charged as standard monthly fees and others are charged on a per-item basis. That makes it hard to understand the costs associated with any given sale. Given the volumes and complexity, you may need an automated accounting software tool designed for eCommerce to get a true handle on what it’s really costing you to sell.
What does it cost to sell a $100 item on Amazon?
Here’s an illustrative example. Let’s take an Amazon seller with an item that sells for $100.
Inventory Cost
Often the largest cost of selling an item on Amazon is the inventory cost itself, what the seller had to pay in order to acquire the item. Let’s say they purchase it for $50 and are reselling it for $100 on Amazon. This $50 inventory cost is typically referred to as Cost of Goods Sold.
Monthly Amazon Fees
Sellers have to pay $39.99/month as a professional seller or $0.99 per item as an individual seller in order to sell on the platform. Let’s assume our seller is selling 100 items per month on the professional plan, so that monthly fee would work out to $0.39 per item sold.
If they are using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) they will also pay monthly storage fees for their inventory to be stored in Amazon’s warehouses. These fees go up if inventory has been stored too long, is oversized, or is dangerous. The fees also go up depending on the time of year when the inventory is being stored with October-December more expensive to handle the peak holiday volumes. Storage in January-September for standard goods might cost $0.78 per cubic foot of inventory stored, plus an Aged Inventory Surcharge starting at $0.50 per cubic foot for items stored longer than 180 days. If our $100 item takes up one cubic foot and has not been stored longer than 180 days, it would cost $0.78 per month to store.
With these two monthly costs, we’re at a total of $0.39 + $0.78, or $1.17 in total monthly costs for our $100 item. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say the item was only stored for 1 month and this is our total FBA storage cost (though in many cases inventory must be stored longer than this.)
Per-Item Fees
Amazon charges a Referral Fee of anywhere from 8-17% depending on the category in which the item is sold, with a minimum $0.30 fee in most categories. Let’s assume our $100 item is something in the Toys & Games category, which is 15%. Our $100 item would cost $15 in Referral Fees.
FBA Fulfillment Fees are also charged on a per-item basis. These fees range significantly depending on the size and weight of the item as well as other factors. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we have a “Large Standard” item and we’re paying approximately $5.50 to have Amazon fulfill this shipment for us.
FBA Fulfillment Fees are where the new 3.5% fuel surcharge fee have been added. We’ll hold that cost out for now and show how that impacts Net Profit at the end of this article.
Amazon Advertising Fees
It used to be enough to list your products on a well-established marketplace to drive sales, but in today’s world, it often requires paying advertising fees in order to generate visibility to those listings as well. Advertising on Amazon is sold on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) basis and costs can range from $0.60 per click in a Low-Competition category to over $5.00 per click in a more competitive space. It’s not uncommon for a seller to pay an additional $15-$30 in Advertising to get a $100 item to sell, though they probably can’t be doing this across all their inventory and remain profitable.
In addition, there are overhead fees to advertising. Agencies to manage your advertising often charge 10-15% of advertising fees. For sponsored brands campaigns, things like high quality photography and ad creative development can be quite expensive.
For simplicity, let’s say advertising costs $5 all in for our $100 item.
Additional Amazon Fees
In addition to the standard fees listed above, there are many additional things Amazon charges for including Inbound Placement Fees, to move your inventory between Amazon Warehouses, Low Inventory Fees, when a high-velocity product becomes low in stock, Returns Processing Fees, Removal Order Fees, when you request your inventory is returned to you, Label Order Fees, when Amazon labels your products for you, and more. For today’s example, we won’t include any of these fees, but they are very real costs of doing business for an Amazon seller.
Net Profit, BEFORE the 3.5% Fuel Surcharge
What is net profit? It’s how much money you’ve made after all of your costs have been taken into account.
In our example of the $100 item sale, we’ve now accounted for the following fees:
$50.00 Inventory / Cost of Goods Sold $0.39 Amazon Professional Sellers Fee $0.78 monthly FBA Storage Fee $15.00 Amazon Referral Fee $5.50 FBA Fulfillment Fee $5.00 Advertising Fees
$76.67 Costs
On our $100 sale, this is a Net Profit of $23.33.
Net Profit, AFTER the 3.5% Fuel Surcharge
If our $100 item has an additional 3.5% Fuel Surcharge, which is calculated on the full cost of the $100 sale, that would be an additional $3.50 in cost.
After the Fuel Surcharge, Net Profit is $19.83. If our seller was making $23.33 before, and now they’re only making $19.83, that is a 15% reduction in Net Profit.
Outsized impact on Net Margin
Your NET PROFIT will drop by 15% in this case
With razor thin margins and massive competition on Amazon already, this is a huge change.
How Can Sellers Understand What this Fee Change Actually Means for their Profits
This was just an illustrative example, and fees on Amazon are very complex. Each seller needs to truly understand their own economics on Amazon in order to know how significant an impact this change will have for them.
The most effective way to truly understand your profits on Amazon is to use an automated accounting software, designed for eCommerce, that will capture the full details of your costs of selling and roll these up to enable you to accurately view your net profit.
Seller Ledger is an automated accounting platform that was designed from the ground up for eCommerce. Sellers can link their Amazon selling account for automated importing and categorization of all Amazon revenues and fees. They can also link their bank accounts and business credit cards to import other costs and sources of revenue. Seller Ledger’s net profit feature allows sellers to see these costs aggregated and understand their net profit. Pricing for Seller Ledger starts at $10/month and there is a 30 day Free trial, no credit card required.
What Can I Do About My Net Profit?
While we can’t solve marginal cost inflation, sourcing cost inflation, tariffs or other increases in your costs, what we can do is offer a lower-cost accounting solution that helps you get full visibility to your numbers at a fraction of the cost of alternatives. We offer a solution that is significantly cheaper than classic accounting software like Quickbooks or Xero, and doesn’t require third-party connectors like A2X or Link My Books to see your eCommerce detail. Give it a try today for FREE, and see if this is a way to claw back some of your net profit.
