Reconciling marketplace facilitator sales tax at year-end means proving two things in the ledger. First, every dollar of tax a marketplace collected from buyers and remitted itself nets to zero in your books: it never inflates revenue, never shows up as a fee, and never sits in your sales tax liability account. Second, every dollar of tax you collected yourself, on your own store or anywhere a marketplace passed tax through to you, sits in a liability account whose December 31 balance you can explain line by line. The first check is mechanical. The second is where the real money hides.
Marketplace facilitator laws move the duty to collect and remit sales tax from the third-party seller to the platform. Each platform documents its own version, and the differences decide what the year-end check looks like.
Amazon's Seller Central page on Marketplace Withheld Tax says the buyer pays the tax, and Amazon reflects the collected amount in order details and reports along with a deduction of the same amount, labeled MarketplaceFacilitatorTax for US orders, equal to what Amazon must remit. The page adds a sentence worth reading twice: if the amount Amazon deducts is less than the amount collected from the buyer, the difference remains the seller's responsibility to remit.
The Tax Document Library offers three US reports. The Marketplace Tax Collection Report covers tax Amazon collected and remitted, and Amazon labels it informational only, not for remitting. The Sales Tax Calculation Report covers tax calculated under your own tax settings. The Combined Sales Tax Report shows both.
There is also a local gap. Amazon's Colorado FAQ explains that home rule jurisdictions that have not enacted marketplace collection rules sit outside what Amazon calculates, and those taxes remain the seller's responsibility. That is an exposure question for your CPA, not a reconciling item, because nothing was collected.
Walmart's Marketplace Learn guide on sales tax collection says Walmart calculates, collects, remits, and refunds tax on orders delivered to the states it lists. For states not on that list, Walmart says you will continue to receive the tax collected in your payout and remain responsible for remitting it until Walmart tells you otherwise. The guide's own FAQ includes a question from sellers still seeing tax in their settlement report on orders to states where Walmart remits, which tells you the settlement file is the place to look.
TikTok Shop's US Sales Tax FAQ says TikTok must collect and remit applicable sales tax on TikTok Shop orders in all US states that impose one, with the tax added at checkout.
eBay's tax policy says eBay calculates, collects, and remits sales tax for items shipped to buyers in the jurisdictions where the law requires it, and sellers cannot opt out. For some US territories where eBay is not required to collect, sellers can set up a tax table and collect themselves.
Your own store is not a marketplace sale. Shopify's US taxes guide says Shopify does not remit or file taxes for you unless you use Shopify Tax with automated filing set up. Tax collected at your checkout is your liability from the moment the buyer pays it.
A settlement sync either ignores facilitator tax entirely, since it nets to zero inside the settlement, or posts both sides: tax collected as a credit and the facilitator deduction as a debit, usually through a sales tax clearing account. Both are defensible. What breaks a year-end close is a third pattern that shows up constantly in hand-built books: tax collected booked into sales, and the withholding booked as a marketplace fee. Revenue and fees both inflate by the same amount, profit does not move, and every margin percentage on the P&L comes out wrong.
Illustrative numbers. Take a seller on Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, eBay, and a Shopify store, closing calendar 2026.
The report ties. The ledger does not. The bookkeeper posted settlements by hand, with the $41,280.00 of collected tax inside Amazon sales and the matching $41,280.00 deduction inside Amazon fees. The correction reclassifies both: debit Amazon sales $41,280.00, credit Amazon fees $41,280.00. Net income is unchanged. Amazon revenue drops by $41,280.00 and so do fees. If true Amazon revenue was $1,200,000.00 with $360,000.00 of fees, the uncorrected ledger showed $1,241,280.00 and $401,280.00, so fees read as 32.3 percent of revenue instead of 30.0 percent.
If the liability account shows $255.00, it ties. If the $3,115.00 went to sales instead, the seller has both overstated revenue and an unrecorded liability, and the CPA needs to see the settlement lines.
Same test as Amazon: collected tax on the platform's report against the platform's withholding, by month, netting to zero, and absent from revenue. On these two channels, an unexplained nonzero total means the export was pulled on a different date basis than the books, or a refund reversal landed in a different month from the original charge.
This is the liability that matters.
The $735.00 traces to refunds. When orders were refunded, the full refund, tax included, was posted to the returns account, so the liability was credited for the tax at sale and never debited when the tax went back to the buyer. The returns were filed from Shopify's net report, so the payments were right and only the ledger was wrong. The correction debits sales tax payable $735.00 and credits returns $735.00, leaving the liability at $1,660.00, which is December's tax awaiting its January return.
The roll-forward takes an afternoon when every settlement lands in the ledger split into sales, shipping, tax collected, facilitator tax withheld, fees, refunds, and the net deposit. ConnectBooks reconciles settlements from Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and eBay into QuickBooks or Xero, with a choice of summarized entries or item-level detail; the Walmart to QuickBooks Online page covers that channel. That is reconciliation, not filing, and nothing here tells you what to file.
The same December close carries the platform 1099-K reconciliation, covered in matching the 1099-K to your books. Run both in the same week. They draw on the same settlement files, and an error found in one usually shows up in the other.
Running an e-commerce business comes with plenty of challenges, but ConnectBooks is here to make your life easier. With real-time insights, seamless integrations, and detailed tracking of your profitability and inventory, you can stay ahead of the game. Whether you’re selling on Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok or eBay, ConnectBooks helps you manage your finances with 100% accuracy and confidence, so you can focus on growing your business.
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