#e-commerce
Accounting solutions for online stores and e-commerce businesses
Any business hosting user uploads, reviews, or listings loses DMCA safe harbor unless it designates an agent with the Copyright Office for $6, renews that designation every three years, and actually enforces a repeat-infringer policy. This guide covers registration, the six elements of a valid takedown notice, the 10-to-14-business-day putback window, and the records that prove compliance.
The EU ended duty-free entry for parcels under €150 on July 1, 2026, France charges €2 per item type, and an EU-wide handling fee of about €2 per parcel arrives in November — Etsy collects the France fee at checkout but not the €3 duty. Here is what each fee costs on a real order and how to book pass-through fees, prepaid duties, and IOSS VAT correctly.
Since January 1, 2026, Mexican intermediation platforms withhold VAT and income tax from business sellers — 50% of VAT and 2.5% of payments with an RFC on file, 100% and 20% without — and SAT holds permanent online access to platform transaction data. Here is how to reconcile payouts, receipts, and credits.
On January 1, 2026, at least six states — Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, Vermont, and Washington — began enforcing bans or reporting rules on products with intentionally added PFAS, and the laws reach anyone who sells or distributes covered goods, not just manufacturers. A state-by-state guide for retailers covering affected categories, supplier certifications, ship-to-state segmentation, and the bookkeeping for compliance costs and inventory write-downs.
ThriveCart's $495 lifetime license is now paired with a $295-per-year Pro+ subscription covering affiliate management, sales-tax calculation, dunning, and custom domains — roughly $1,575 over three years with Learn+. A four-question framework shows when Pro+ pays for itself, when to let it lapse, and how to book lifetime deals, renewals, and gross Stripe payouts correctly.
Zone skipping loads all parcels bound for one region onto a single truck and hands them to the carrier near the customer, repricing a Zone 7–8 cross-country label as bulk freight plus a Zone 2 final leg — a 20–40% cut on that leg and roughly $5,000 off a $30,000 week for 3,000 New York–to–California packages. It only pays above about 1,000–1,500 parcels a week to one region and adds about one transit day; this guide covers the break-even math, the mistakes that erase the savings, cheaper alternatives like split inventory and rate shopping, and how to book linehaul freight, consolidator fees and final-leg postage so the program's margin is actually measurable.
Since July 9, 2026, Etsy requires non-US sellers to ship to US buyers under Delivered Duty Paid (DDP), making the seller responsible for import duties now that the US de minimis exemption is gone. This guide covers what DDP actually costs (the tariff plus 15–17 dollar carrier clearance fees), how to rebuild landed cost per listing, and how to book and reconcile embedded versus actual duties every month.
A returnless refund is a sales allowance, not a return. No inventory comes back, so nothing gets restocked and COGS stays put. This guide gives the per-SKU break-even math for when letting a customer keep a $40 item beats paying return shipping, the exact double-entry bookings for restocked returns, keep-it refunds and unsellable returns, the sales-tax posting, fraud guardrails, and the three metrics that show whether the policy is working.
Square raised its free-plan online card rate from 2.9% + 30¢ to 3.3% + 30¢ on January 13, 2026, and paid plans moved to 2.9% + 30¢. Compute the annual cost of the increase, find the new Square Plus break-even near $12,250 per month in online volume, and see when interchange-plus pricing beats a flat rate.
The EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) has applied since 13 December 2024, requiring online sellers to keep product information for 10 years and supply-chain traceability records for 6. This checklist covers supply-chain roles, distance-sale listing requirements, complaint registers, a five-step recall playbook, and how to reconcile recall costs in your ledger.
Whether shipping is taxable depends on the destination state, the taxability of the items, who billed the delivery, and whether the customer could avoid the charge. This guide covers the five questions that control the answer, the main state-rule patterns in New York, Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina, how to allocate delivery charges on mixed taxable and exempt orders, and a monthly checklist for defensible shipping-tax records.
Amazon limits most non-media product titles to 75 characters and adds a 125-character Item Highlights field. This workflow shows sellers how to inventory the catalog, decide what stays in the title, log every edit, and reconcile listing changes to SKU-level books.
