23 costs of selling on Amazon (how many is your spreadsheet tracking?)

A spreadsheet can track a sale and a fee. Most sellers eventually find out the hard way that a normal year has a lot more line items than that. Here’s the full list, in roughly the order they hit:

1. Company registration — the state fee to form your LLC.
2. Sales tax certificate — required before you can legally collect and remit.
3. Card processing fees — on both the registration and the certificate, since almost nothing is paid by check anymore.
4. Domain and hosting — for a business site, even a simple one.
5. Website build — DIY or paid, it’s a real cost either way.
6. Amazon seller account fee — the recurring $40/month professional-selling fee.
7. Virtual assistant retainer — for sourcing, listing, or customer service help.
8. Inventory — the actual product cost, paid to your supplier.
9. Inbound freight — getting product from the supplier to a prep center or Amazon.
10. Prep, per item — labeling, poly-bagging, bundling.
11. Prep, per box — packing and carton fees on top of per-item prep.
12. Disposal fees at the prep center — for units damaged before they ever reach Amazon.
13. Disposal fees at Amazon — for units Amazon itself finds damaged.
14. Supplier short-credits on damage — the gap between what you claimed and what the supplier actually agreed to credit.
15. Amazon storage, per day — metered daily, not monthly.
16. Referral fee — Amazon’s cut of every sale.
17. Fulfillment fee — the cost of Amazon picking, packing, and shipping each unit.
18. Lost-inventory shortfalls — units Amazon’s own count says vanished, reimbursed at Amazon’s valuation, not yours.
19. Recovery-service commission — if you hire someone to dispute Amazon’s reimbursement math, they keep a cut of whatever they win back.
20. Return processing — the cost of a returned unit coming back into inventory, sellable or not.
21. Removal or disposal orders — Amazon’s fee to ship inventory back to you or destroy it on request.
22. Accountant fees — to build a P&L that actually ties to your 1099-K.
23. Annual state renewal — and the cycle starts again.

Where each one actually belongs

Every line above is a real double-entry posting in SellerTally the moment it happens — inventory and freight capitalize into cost of goods sold, fees post to the right expense account, damage and disposal adjust the inventory count in real time, and the whole year reconciles against your 1099-K automatically. Your spreadsheet was never going to keep up with 23 moving parts by hand — that’s not a knock on your spreadsheet, it’s just more line items than one person can track without the system doing the posting for you.

Most of the FBA-specific lines above — fulfilment, storage, reimbursements — are covered in more depth in Amazon FBA accounting.