Settlement: what actually reaches your bank

A seller lists at 199, sells 100 units, and expects roughly 19,900. What lands is smaller, and the gap is not one deduction but several. Planning against the listing price rather than the settlement is the most common way to be wrong about your own margin.

Selling price is not revenue

Between the buyer paying and you being paid, a marketplace deducts its commission, shipping charges, and applicable taxes. What remains is the settlement: the figure your pricing should be built on.

The exact components and rates depend on your category, price band, and current platform policy, and they change. Rather than trusting a number you read somewhere, take a recent payment report, divide what actually arrived by the units it covered, and use that.

Deriving it from GST instead

If your listing price includes GST and you want the pre-tax figure, divide rather than subtract:

settlement = selling price / (1 + GST rate)

  199 / 1.05 = 189.52   correct
  199 - 5%   = 189.05   wrong

Subtracting the percentage takes it off the wrong base. The error is small per unit and material across a month.

Think in deduction, not settlement

The useful mental model is that the platform takes a fairly stable cut, and your settlement moves with your price. If the gap is 10 at a price of 199, raising the price to 249 does not hand the extra 50 to the platform — most of it reaches you.

This is why the calculator on this site holds the deduction constant when you change selling price, and moves the settlement with it. Model it the other way and price changes appear to do nothing, which is not how it works.

One thing worth checking

Reconcile a full settlement cycle by hand at least once. Take every order in the period, add up what you expected, compare it against what arrived, and chase the difference. Sellers who do this typically find at least one deduction they did not know applied to them.

The profit calculator takes settlement directly, or derives it from your GST rate, and shows the per-order figure so you can sanity-check it against a real payment report.