Amazon seller chart of accounts: a structure that actually fits how you sell

Open the default chart of accounts in most bookkeeping software and you’ll find “Sales,” “Cost of Goods Sold,” and “Operating Expenses” — three or four levels deep, generic enough to fit a coffee shop or a law firm. It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just missing every category an Amazon seller actually needs, which means every Amazon-specific dollar gets crammed into a bucket that doesn’t describe it. Referral fees end up in “Bank Charges.” FBA fulfilment fees end up in “Shipping.” PPC spend ends up in “Advertising,” lumped in with a Google Ads campaign that has nothing to do with it.

None of that is fatal on its own. What it costs you is the ability to answer a simple question — where is my margin actually going? — without exporting three reports and reconciling them by hand.

Why a generic template falls short here

Amazon selling has a handful of cost types that don’t exist in a typical small business, and a chart of accounts that doesn’t name them separately can’t report on them separately:

• Marketplace fees are not one thing. Referral fees, FBA pick-and-pack, FBA storage, and long-term storage penalties behave completely differently and respond to different decisions — lumping them together hides which one is actually eating your margin.
• Inventory is an asset before it’s an expense. A generic template often treats a supplier payment as an expense the day it’s paid. For a seller carrying stock, that’s backwards — see below.
• Advertising has its own cost curve. Amazon PPC spend needs to be visible on its own, separate from any other marketing line, because it’s the one expense category most sellers actively manage week to week.
• Reimbursements and refunds cut across categories. A lost-inventory reimbursement isn’t income in the way a sale is, and a customer refund isn’t simply “negative sales” if you want an accurate gross margin.

A structure built for Amazon selling

This is a generic, textbook-style chart of accounts shaped around those categories — the kind of structure any bookkeeping guide would recommend for a marketplace seller, not tied to any particular software. Adapt the numbering to whatever your own system expects; the categories are what matters.

Income

• Product Sales
• Shipping Income (if you sell off-platform or charge shipping separately)
• Other Income (reimbursements, settlements, unrelated income)

Cost of Goods Sold

• Inventory — Cost of Goods Sold (released when a unit sells, not when it’s purchased)
• Inbound Freight & Duty
• FBA Fulfilment Fees
• Referral Fees (Amazon’s per-sale commission)

Operating Expenses

• Advertising — Amazon PPC
• Advertising — Other/Off-platform
• FBA Storage Fees
• Software & Subscriptions
• Contract Labor / Virtual Assistants
• Merchant Processing Fees (for any non-Amazon sales channel)
• Office & Admin
• Professional Fees (accounting, legal)

Assets

• Cash
• Inventory (on hand, at landed cost)
• Accounts Receivable (rare for Amazon sellers, common if you also sell wholesale)

Liabilities

• Sales Tax Payable
• Credit Card Payable
• Accrued Amazon Fees (fees incurred but not yet settled)

Equity

• Owner’s Equity / Retained Earnings

The shape is intentionally close to a standard retail chart of accounts — inventory as an asset, COGS separated from operating expenses, sales tax as a liability, not income. The Amazon-specific part is entirely in how granular the marketplace fee and advertising categories are. That granularity is what lets a P&L actually answer “what changed” instead of just “did I make money.”

The inventory line is where most sellers get it wrong

Worth calling out on its own: inventory purchases belong on the balance sheet as an asset when you buy them, not on the P&L as an expense. The cost only moves to Cost of Goods Sold when a unit actually sells, matched against that sale’s revenue. Expense the purchase immediately instead, and a big restock month looks like a loss even though nothing was actually lost — you just converted cash into inventory sitting on a shelf. This is common enough, and consequential enough, that it’s worth a full explanation on its own — see why purchases aren’t an expense for the worked example.

Keeping it usable

A chart of accounts is only as good as the discipline behind using it. A few rules that keep this one from drifting back into a junk-drawer “Miscellaneous” category over time:

1. Every Amazon fee type gets its own line, even small ones — a category with three transactions a year still tells you something a merged “Fees” bucket doesn’t.
2. Never post a supplier payment straight to COGS. It’s inventory until it sells.
3. Keep PPC separate from every other kind of spend, since it’s the lever you’re most likely to pull deliberately, and you want to see the effect of pulling it.
4. Review the list once a quarter, not once a year — a new category (a new sales channel, a new fee Amazon introduces) is easiest to add before six months of transactions have already piled up in the wrong place.

Get the structure right once, and the reports built on top of it — gross margin by SKU, true landed-cost profitability, a P&L that separates “what Amazon charged me” from “what I chose to spend” — become something you can trust without re-deriving them from raw statements every time someone asks.