Chart of Accounts for eCommerce: What to Track (and What to Skip)
By the I&S Accounting teamReviewed by a licensed U.S. CPA
Your Chart of Accounts Is a List of Questions You Can Answer
A chart of accounts sounds like plumbing, but it decides what your books can ever tell you. If every sale lands in one "Sales" account and every cost in "Fees," your P&L can answer exactly one question: did money move? The questions that matter — which channel makes money, what do fees really cost, what's my true margin — need structure.
Here's the structure that works for sellers, without the 300-account bloat nobody maintains.
Revenue: Split by Channel, Net Nothing
One revenue account per meaningful channel:
- Sales — Shopify
- Sales — Amazon
- Sales — TikTok Shop / Walmart / wholesale, as applicable
- Refunds & allowances — contra-revenue, per channel if volume justifies it
Record gross order value here; never let processors net their fees out of revenue. The whole point is seeing what each channel sells versus what it costs to sell there — which is how one channel's quiet unprofitability gets caught.
COGS: More Than the Supplier Invoice
A real COGS section for a product seller:
- Product cost (at landed cost — freight, duties included)
- Fulfillment & shipping out
- Marketplace commissions & referral fees
- Payment processing fees
- Packaging
Some sellers keep commissions and processing in operating expenses instead — defensible, as long as it's consistent and you know your contribution margin either way. What's not defensible is one undifferentiated "fees" pile.
The Accounts Sellers Forget
- Inventory (asset) — purchases park here, not in expenses.
- Sales tax payable (liability) — collected tax is not revenue; see our nexus guide.
- Chargebacks & disputes — worth their own line; a rising trend is an early-warning light, not noise.
- Platform reserves/holds — money a processor is sitting on is your asset, not a mystery.
- Advertising by platform — Meta, Google, Amazon ads separated, because ROAS conversations die in a blended account.
What to Skip
Resist the account-per-SKU, account-per-state, account-per-promo instinct. That detail belongs in your commerce stack's reports, not the general ledger. The chart should stay small enough that every transaction lands in an obvious place — that's what keeps categorization consistent, and consistency is what makes the numbers comparable month over month.
The Bottom Line
Ten deliberate accounts beat a hundred accidental ones. Set the chart up around the decisions you actually make and the books start answering questions instead of storing transactions. It's the first thing we fix when an eCommerce client comes to us with books that "technically exist" — and it's included in every monthly package, CPA-reviewed.
Frequently asked questions
Sales channels and fees. A generic chart lumps everything into 'Sales' and 'Merchant fees'; an eCommerce chart separates revenue by channel and fees by platform, so you can see that Shopify runs profitably while a marketplace channel quietly doesn't.
Group by decision, not by line item. Payment processing, marketplace commissions, fulfillment, and advertising deserve separate accounts because you act on them differently. Splitting hairs beyond that creates a chart nobody maintains.
A liability account — never revenue. Money you collected for a state is money you're holding, and mixing it into sales overstates revenue and eventually funds a remittance out of cash you thought was yours.
You can start there, but defaults are built for generic small businesses. Ten focused changes — channel revenue splits, fee groupings, a real COGS section, inventory and sales-tax liability accounts — turn it into something that answers eCommerce questions.