What marketplace facilitator rules mean for your return, and which reports we actually need from you.
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Selling through a marketplace changes who's responsible for VAT on some of your sales — but not all of them — and that split is where most sellers' returns go wrong.
Marketplace facilitator rules, in short: for certain sales — mainly goods already in the UK sold by an overseas seller, or low-value imports sold to UK customers — the marketplace (Amazon, for example) is treated as the seller for VAT purposes and accounts for the VAT itself. For a UK-established business selling to UK customers, you're usually still the one accounting for VAT once you're registered.
The reconciliation problem: your bank statement shows what actually landed after Amazon or Shopify took fees, ads spend, FBA charges and refunds off the top. That's not your sales figure. VAT is due on the gross sale price, so reconciling from bank deposits alone will get your return wrong.
What we actually need from you: the platform's own VAT or tax transaction report for the period (Amazon's VAT Transactions Report, or Shopify's tax finance reports), not just a bank export. These show gross sales, fees, and marketplace-collected VAT separately, which is what a correct return is built from.
Multi-channel sellers: if you're on Amazon and Shopify and eBay at once, each platform reports differently and none of them reconcile with each other automatically. This is the single biggest cause of an inflated VAT bill we see — sales counted twice, or marketplace-collected VAT declared again by mistake.
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