What is marketplace reconciliation and why are you losing money without it?

When you sell on a marketplace, you do not receive a payment per order. You receive a periodic settlement: a single amount that compresses hundreds of orders, commissions, shipping costs, returns, advertising contributions, and corrections. The breakdown differs per marketplace — different file format, different columns, different logic.

Without reconciliation, you see only the final amount. Whether that amount matches what you should have received based on your own orders is unknown. And marketplaces make mistakes: incorrect commission rates, returns deducted twice, forgotten payouts, unjustified penalties.

Reconciliation connects three worlds: your own order system (what did I sell), the marketplace reports (what does the marketplace say was sold), and the settlements (what was actually paid out). Per order, it calculates what should have been paid — selling price minus agreed commission minus permitted costs — and compares that to what actually came in.

Every discrepancy becomes a case: a missing payout, a commission that deviates from your contract, a return that was deducted twice. With an amount, evidence, and a deadline to file a claim.

In practice, we see discrepancies of 1 to 3 percent of marketplace revenue at webshops reconciling for the first time. At €50,000 per month in marketplace sales, that is €500 to €1,500 per month — every single month, as long as no one checks.

The largest items are almost always: orders that were never paid out, commission rates that silently deviate from the agreed rate, and returns that were deducted from the payout and settled separately as well.

Manual reconciliation in Excel is possible — for a single marketplace, at low volumes, with strict discipline. But every marketplace has its own export format, order numbers written slightly differently, and settlements that mix orders from multiple months. Above a few hundred orders per month, manual work is not sustainable and errors creep into the checking process itself.

Automated reconciliation normalizes the files, matches on multiple keys (order number, invoice reference, shipping reference), and recalculates every order against your contract terms. What remains is a list of cases to follow up on rather than a spreadsheet to build.