Accounting for e-commerce & online retail.

A fixed monthly figure agreed in writing after a 30-minute discovery call. For e-commerce the drivers are the number of sales channels and payment processors to reconcile, transaction volume, whether stock is tracked properly, and whether you sell across borders. Volume alone is not the issue — the platforms are. One Shopify store with Stripe is straightforward; four marketplaces, two currencies and Amazon FBA is not. FreeAgent is included, worth up to £330 a year, and Xero suits most sellers with stock.

Because the payout is not the sale. Every platform settles net of something — commission, payment processing, advertising, shipping subsidies, refunds and sometimes marketplace-collected VAT — so booking the money that lands in the bank as revenue understates both turnover and costs, often by 20% or more. Done properly, each sale is recorded gross and every deduction is booked as its own cost, which is the only way to see a real margin. This is the single most common error in e-commerce bookkeeping and it distorts VAT as well as profit.

For some transactions. Large marketplaces are treated as the deemed supplier for certain sales — particularly imports and sales by overseas sellers — and account for the VAT themselves. That does not remove your obligations: you still have to account correctly for everything from their reports, distinguish deemed-supplier sales from your own, and file your own returns. The reports are detailed and easy to double-count. Assuming the platform has dealt with it is how sellers end up either paying VAT twice or not at all.

Yes, and it is the most common surprise in this sector. Storing stock in another country — usually through Amazon's pan-European or European fulfilment programmes — generally creates a VAT registration obligation in each country where the inventory physically sits, from the first sale rather than at a threshold. Sellers frequently enable a programme that redistributes stock automatically and find out months later. Check where your stock is before enabling any cross-border fulfilment option, and factor the cost of multiple registrations into the decision.

Properly, because without it your margin is a guess. The minimum is a cost of goods figure that moves with sales rather than with purchases: buying £20,000 of stock in March does not make March a bad month, and selling it in June does not make June a good one. That means a stock count at least at the year end, ideally quarterly, and a system that values what is on hand. Landed cost matters too — duty, freight and fulfilment fees belong in cost of goods, not in overheads.

One Stop Shop lets you report VAT on business-to-consumer sales across the EU through a single return rather than registering in every member state. Import One Stop Shop lets you collect EU VAT at checkout on consignments up to €150, so parcels clear customs without the customer being charged on delivery — which materially reduces refused deliveries. You need them if you sell to EU consumers at any scale. Neither covers stock held in the EU, which is a separate registration question entirely.