Why your marketplace payout never matches your sales

You sold 10 lakh on Amazon last month. The payout that hit your bank was 6.2 lakh. Nothing was stolen. The gap is fees, returns and timing, buried in a settlement file almost nobody reads line by line.

Order value is not payout

Before a marketplace pays you, it deducts commission, fulfilment fees, shipping, storage, ad spend, RTO charges and returns. Gross order value and net settlement are two completely different numbers, and only one of them is real money.

The timing mismatch

An order placed this month often settles next month, and a return claws revenue back weeks after the sale. So cash and sales never line up by date, and a naive month-on-month comparison is always slightly fiction.

Why this quietly hides your margin

If you track order value and never open the settlement, a SKU can look like a hero on revenue while the fees have eaten it alive. That is the cut nobody ran, and it is where D2C margin goes to die.

The number that matters is not what you sold. It is what actually landed, minus what it cost to land it.

The fix: reconcile settlements to orders, per SKU

Pull the settlement files, match every line to its order, attribute every fee, and you finally see true contribution margin by SKU and by channel. That is a data problem, and it is solvable once your sources sit in one governed place.

How dataeze does it

We ingest Shopify, marketplace and settlement data into one governed layer, so payout, order value and margin reconcile automatically, down to the SKU. Live in 6 to 8 weeks.