Amazon fulfills a website order: assign the sale to the right channel

Retain the original storefront order identifier and the separate fulfillment request identifier. Record which channel accepted the customer's purchase, which provider collected payment and which warehouse network shipped the goods. These roles can belong to different systems. A fulfillment record in Amazon does not establish that the customer bought through Amazon's marketplace.

Amazon explains that Multi-Channel Fulfillment serves orders from other channels and can use inventory shared with FBA. Its fee basis includes product size, shipping weight, units per order and delivery speed. Those facts create two accounting needs: a channel-specific sales trail and a shared-stock movement trail.

Determine which integration owns sales and customer payments for the website order. Confirm that the fulfillment connector only supplies the events it is meant to supply. If both integrations create customer sales, an order can be counted twice even though the bank received one payment. Test the workflow with an ordinary order, a cancellation and a return before relying on totals.

Keep channel dimensions independent from fulfillment location. A report that assigns every Amazon-shipped unit to marketplace sales will misstate the website's margin and the marketplace's revenue. Preserve the website sale and allocate its fulfillment cost using the linked order reference. Where a provider bill covers many channels, retain the allocation detail.

Check partial shipments. One website order can generate several fulfillment events, and its cost may arrive in separate charges. Those events should remain attached to one commercial order without creating extra customer acquisition or order-count records.

Build the stock movement schedule using receipts, marketplace shipments, off-marketplace fulfillment, returns and adjustments. Separate those movement types before comparing the ending quantity with the ledger. If the website's own inventory app also decreases stock for the same fulfillment, confirm that the shared-pool integration does not apply a second decrease.

For a hypothetical pool with 500 opening units, 120 marketplace shipments and 80 website shipments, the balance before other movements is 300 units. Counting only marketplace sales leaves an unexplained 80-unit shortage. Counting the website shipment in both systems understates the pool by another 80 units. The movement identifiers establish which entry represents the actual physical issue.

Document who handles the customer refund, who receives the returned goods and who pursues any fulfillment claim. A storefront may refund the buyer while another system records the physical return. Preserve the link so the accountant can reconcile revenue adjustments, stock recovery and fulfillment costs without assuming they occur together.

At the close, review unmatched fulfillment references, fees without customer orders and website orders with no stock issue. Give each exception an owner from the system responsible for the missing event. Channel reporting is ready when the sale, payment, inventory issue and fulfillment costs can all be traced through the same commercial order, even though they originated in separate systems.