General

Period comparison is the measurement of a metric in one time window against the same metric in an earlier window of the same length, expressed as a difference or a percentage change. Week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year are the standard windows; a custom peri...

Before Q4, a multichannel seller needs answers to twenty questions, and each one names the data it needs and the decision it drives. The list below is grouped by phase. Work it in order, because the later questions (ad budget, cash, channel mix) depend on the earlier ones (inventory position, sto...

A Temu settlement tells you what Temu paid you, for which orders, after which deductions, over which period. That is enough to answer "what did I clear on Temu this month" and "which Temu SKUs carried the payout." It is not enough to answer "which Temu SKUs made money," because the settlement car...

"Which products lost money last month after fees" is one question with six different arithmetic problems behind it. Amazon takes a referral fee and, for FBA, a fulfillment fee. Walmart takes a referral fee and, for WFS, a fulfillment fee on a different weight schedule. eBay takes a final value fe...

AI ecommerce analytics answers a seller's plain-language questions about profit, margin, ads, inventory, fees, and cash from that seller's own reconciled data, across the channels the data covers. The twelve questions below are the ones sellers running Amazon plus two or three other marketplaces ...

"What did my ads earn last month" is three different questions when the ads ran on Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop, because each platform decides for itself which sales its ads get credit for. Amazon Ads credits a sale to a sponsored ad when the purchase follows a click inside the platform's att...

Channel margins compare like for like only when every channel is reduced to the same contribution line: net revenue to the seller, minus marketplace fees, minus fulfillment cost, minus attributable ad cost, minus the cost of returns, minus FIFO cost of goods. Each marketplace names those pieces d...

An eBay seller can ask an AI useful questions about profit once the payout data is broken into its parts and each part sits on the item that caused it: sale amount, final value fee, ad fee, shipping label, international charge, refund, and the item's own cost. The catch that is specific to eBay i...

A TikTok Shop week can triple sales and lose money in the same seven days, because the two costs that scale with a creator-driven spike, affiliate commission and returns, scale faster than the contribution the spike brings in. Analyzing the channel means reading the settlement at the SKU level, w...

Multichannel profit attribution is the practice of assigning every element of profit, including revenue, cost of goods, marketplace fees, shipping, advertising, and returns, to the sales channel that generated it, so that Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and eBay can be compared on what eac...

A Walmart Marketplace seller's margin is decided by three charges the platform sets and one cost it never sees: the referral fee by category, the Walmart Fulfillment Services fee by shipping weight, storage by cubic foot and season, and your landed cost per unit. An AI can answer questions about ...

A question to an AI financial assistant needs five things stated explicitly: the period, the scope, the measure, the cost basis, and how you will check the answer. Leave any of them implicit and the software fills the gap with a default you did not choose. The number that comes back will be inter...

Automation closes the parts of the month that are deterministic: payout matching, transaction coding, fee classification, bank reconciliation. It stops at four places where a person has to decide what is true. Those four are costing policy, accrual judgment, the exception queue, and the final rev...

AI bookkeeping scales on work where the cost of handling one more transaction is close to zero and the rules do not change: classifying a bank line, matching a deposit against a settlement report, coding a recurring vendor bill. It does not scale on work that depends on something physical happeni...

The question gets asked two ways. A seller asks it to find out whether they can stop paying someone. A bookkeeper asks it to find out whether to retrain. The answers differ, so both are below, with the labor data attached rather than an opinion.

Every AI accounting tool, from every vendor, produces answers whose quality is capped by the data underneath. In ecommerce that cap is low by default, and not because sellers are careless. It is low because the data arrives from five or six systems that disagree with each other about what a sale ...

Vendor demos in this category all look the same, because the chat interface is the easy part and everyone has a good one. The differences that matter are in data intake, costing, verifiability, and controls, and none of them show up in a scripted walkthrough.

Given clean, reconciled ecommerce data, current analysis models are competent. They will compute a margin bridge, rank SKUs by contribution, and describe a cash cycle without difficulty. What they will not do is decide what is worth asking, and most of the disappointment in this category comes fr...

Anomaly detection in financial data is the practice of comparing new transactions or balances against an expected pattern and flagging the ones that deviate. It answers one question: is this different from what usually happens here. It does not answer whether the usual thing is correct, which tur...

AI helps accountants most in the work clients never see, and breaks in the work clients care about most. Drafting, coding, summarizing, and first-pass matching have gotten meaningfully faster. Inventory valuation, period cutoffs on marketplace data, and anything requiring a judgment call about a ...

An AI CFO can only answer questions your ledger already contains the facts to answer. If marketplace payouts land as single deposits, if all fees share one expense account, and if cost of goods sold posts as a month-end estimate, no analysis tool from any vendor will tell you anything you did not...

Agentic AI in accounting means software that takes multi-step actions on its own rather than answering a single question. An assistant tells you which account a transaction belongs in. An agent codes it, posts it, clears the reconciliation, and moves to the next one. The difference is permission ...

AI bookkeeping software reliably automates four things in an ecommerce business: coding bank and card transactions to expense accounts, extracting fields from supplier invoices and freight bills, matching payments against open records, and flagging entries that break a pattern. It partly automate...

Buying AI accounting software goes wrong in the same place almost every time: the seller compares feature lists across three products that do not do the same job. This is an evaluation guide, organized around the decisions that actually separate the options. It assumes a real multichannel busines...

A general-purpose chatbot can explain your settlement report, write the formula you need, and draft a reconciliation checklist. It cannot close your books. The blocking problems are not intelligence problems: the file is often too large to upload intact, the data required to compute cost of goods...

An AI CFO is software that reads your accounting data and answers finance questions in plain language. What was margin by channel last month. Which SKUs lost money after fees. Why cash fell while revenue rose. What happens to contribution if landed cost climbs eleven percent. It does not sign a t...

AI bookkeeping is the use of machine learning models to perform the recording steps of bookkeeping: classifying transactions to accounts, matching payments to invoices and deposits, flagging entries that look wrong, and drafting journal entries for review. The term describes a method, not a produ...

Etsy stacks more separate fees on a single sale than almost any other channel, and bills some of them after the fact. If you only watch deposits, you will never see what Etsy actually costs you.

The eCommerce Profit Simulator is a powerful new feature inside ConnectBooks that lets you model your profitability before you make a decision, so you can move forward with confidence, not guesswork.

A ConnectBooks customer added Walmart Marketplace as a third channel in late 2024 after operating on Amazon and Shopify for several years. Six months in, the accounting differences had surfaced enough lessons that we wrote them down. This is what a careful Walmart launch looks like through an accounting lens.

The 2024-2026 tariff escalation has done more to reshape ecommerce unit economics than any other macro event in the last decade. Sellers who source from China have been absorbing 7.5 to 25 percent landed-cost increases, often without being able to raise prices proportionally. This is what's actually happening, what the math looks like, and what's working for sellers who are still profitable.

A multi-marketplace home and kitchen brand doing $7M in annual revenue across Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, eBay, and TikTok Shop migrated to ConnectBooks in April 2026. Here's what they found and what changed.

Quarterly trends posts usually recycle the previous quarter's headlines. The five things below are different. Each one has shown up in our customers' books in the last 90 days. If you sell on more than one marketplace, at least three of these are already costing you money you can't see without per-SKU reporting.

Discover how ConnectBooks started in 2017 from a small bookkeeping company and grew into a leading e-commerce accounting solution by automating Amazon-to-QuickBooks data workflows.

Eytan Wiener becomes Head of Growth at ConnectBooks, bringing nearly two decades of eCommerce leadership to scale the platform among sellers, bookkeepers, and fintech partners.

At ConnectBooks, we know that clarity and control are the lifeblood of ecommerce success. That’s why we created an all-new Comparison Dashboard—a sleek, powerful new feature for analyzing performance over time, with the clarity and control you’ve been asking for. 

If you’re an eCommerce seller, you’ve likely felt the sting of the recent tariff increases. Whether you're sourcing from China or shipping across borders, these added costs are squeezing margins and shaking up pricing strategies across the board.‍ And while we can’t control government policy, we can control how we respond.

Dive into the world of Xero integrations and learn about the top functionalities you can find on the Xero App Store, how to setup and utilize Xero integrations for your business processes.

As an Amazon Seller the margin for error can be thin and the difference between a successful business and a fledgling one often lies in the details of how your business is managed. That’s why it's important to understand not just the best practices of running a store but to have a strong understanding of the pitfalls and mistakes that can be avoided. 

Global eCommerce has been expanding year on year at a rapid pace. Even the coronavirus pandemic can’t keep down sales. But while COVID-19 sparked an international economic downturn, causing a lot of people to pull back on the amount they were spending on offline retail, many consumers moved to shop online to avoid the risks of infection.