Selling on Shopee, Lazada or TikTok Shop is easy to start and easy to lose track of. Orders come in every day, the platform takes its fees before it pays you, and the money lands in your bank or e-wallet days later as one round number. If you only write down that number, you never see what you really sold or what selling online costs you.
Your payout is not your sales
The most common mistake online sellers make is recording the payout as their sales. Take an order of ₱1,000. The platform keeps a commission, a transaction fee and maybe a shipping or campaign fee, and pays you ₱880. Your sale was ₱1,000. The ₱120 is an expense of selling online. Record both, separately:
- Sales: the full price the buyer paid for your products.
- Platform fees: commission, transaction and service fees, each month, from the platform's statement.
- Payout: the money you received. Sales minus fees should match it. If it does not, something is missing.
Recording the gross sale keeps your sales figure honest, shows you how much each platform really costs, and gives your accountant what they need. How platform fees and any amounts withheld are treated for tax is a question for your accountant or your RDO.
What to track every month
- Sales per platform. Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, your own page and walk-in buyers, each kept apart, so you can compare them.
- Platform fees. Download the monthly statement or income report from each seller center and record the fees as one expense per platform.
- Shipping and packaging. Boxes, pouches, tape, bubble wrap and any courier costs you pay yourself.
- Ads and vouchers. Sponsored listings and the vouchers you fund are marketing costs. They are often bigger than people expect.
- Stock bought. Supplier invoices for the products you resell, with the receipts kept.
- Returns and cancelled orders. Note them, so your sales figure matches what you actually kept.
Know your profit per product
A product can sell well and still lose money once the fee, the voucher and the packaging are paid. For your best sellers, write down what one unit costs you, then compare it with the price after fees. The products with a thin margin are the ones to reprice, bundle or stop pushing with ads.
A simple routine
- Daily or every few days: record your sales, or one total per platform per day if you have many small orders.
- Weekly: record stock you bought and packaging, and check which products are running low.
- Monthly: record each platform's fees from its statement, check that sales minus fees matches your payouts, and look at profit per platform and per product.
How PrimerLedger helps
PrimerLedger does not connect to Shopee, Lazada or TikTok Shop: you record your sales and fees yourself, the same way you would in a spreadsheet. What it adds is structure. Add each platform as a store, tag every sale with it, and the reports show sales per store side by side. Add a "Platform fees" expense category with one subcategory per platform. Give each product its cost per unit, and the Products report shows sales, cost, profit and margin per product, while invoices take units out of stock and a low-stock alert tells you when to reorder. See categories, items and stores and reports.