How Indian marketplace sellers lose ₹10–21 lakh a year to fees they never agreed to — and the three checks that stop it.
Published by OM Global Accounting & Advisory · October 2026
Key Findings
A mid-size marketplace seller — 2,500 orders a month, ₹999 average order value, 35% return rate — leaks an estimated ₹86,000–₹1,79,000 every month to wrong fees, unreversed charges and shipping overcharges. That is ₹10–21 lakh a year. And the leakage roughly doubles when the return rate rises from 15% to 35%.
Three failure patterns account for nearly all of it:
- Wrong fee slabs — orders charged at a commission slab the product does not belong to.
- Fees retained on refunded orders — charges that survive even when the sale itself is reversed.
- Shipping overcharges — weight-slab billing that rounds up beyond what the courier actually carried.
None of the three appears as an error in the settlement file. The file simply shows a lower payout. Only order-by-order reconciliation against the published fee schedule reveals them.
Executive Summary
A settlement is a claim by the marketplace, not a fact. It states what the marketplace decided to pay you — after deducting what it decided to charge you. This report is based on OM Accounting’s reconciliation work: 15–18 lakh transactions reconciled every month across 40+ ecommerce brands selling on Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Meesho and Shopify. Across that work, the same three failure patterns recur: wrong fee slabs, fees retained on refunded orders, and shipping overcharges. Each is small per order — often just a few rupees. Multiplied across thousands of orders, they are the difference between a profitable store and a merely busy one.
Estimated Monthly Leakage by Seller Size
| Seller profile | Orders / month | Average order value | Return rate | Estimated leak / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 500 | ₹799 | 15% | ₹8,500–₹17,000 |
| Growing | 2,500 | ₹999 | 35% | ₹86,000–₹1,79,000 |
| Established | 10,000 | ₹1,299 | 35% | ₹4,40,000–₹9,10,000 |
Modeled estimates — see Methodology & Important Notes below. The annual figure for a growing seller, ₹10–21 lakh, exceeds what most sellers pay for a full year of specialist accounting.
Leak 1: Wrong Fee Slabs
Marketplace commission is category-specific, and categories are not stable. Listing drift, catalogue merges and category re-mapping quietly move a product into a slab it does not belong to — and the marketplace bills at the new, higher rate from that day on. Because the settlement still shows a commission line that looks plausible, nobody questions it. Estimated share of total leakage: 30–40%.
Leak 2: Fees on Refunded Orders
When an order is refunded, the reversal is partial. The commission may reverse while logistics charges, fixed fees and the GST charged on those fees do not. For apparel sellers running 25–40% return rates, this is the largest single bucket. Estimated share of total leakage: 35–45%.
Leak 3: Shipping Weight Slabs
Shipping is billed by weight slab, and the weight used is not always the weight shipped. Dead weight versus volumetric weight, plus default slab rounding, pushes parcels into higher slabs than the courier’s own measurements justify. Estimated share of total leakage: 20–30%.
The Returns Multiplier
Returns do not just cost the sale. Every returned order re-opens the fee file: reverse logistics, retained charges, GST-on-fee complications. At the same order volume, moving from a 15% return rate to 35% roughly doubles the total leak — which is why high-return categories, fashion above all, lose the most money in settlements even when their top line looks healthy.
What Sellers Can Do: Three Checks
- The 1% test: re-price 50 random orders against the published rate card. If more than 1% are mispriced, the problem is systemic, not noise.
- The refund trace: take 20 refunded orders and verify that every charge tied to them was reversed — including the GST on fees.
- The slab audit: compare billed shipping slabs against the courier’s measured weights for one dispatch day.
Methodology & Important Notes
This report presents modeled estimates, not audited client data. The ranges are computed from illustrative seller profiles using publicly known marketplace fee structures and the charge patterns OM Accounting observes in its reconciliation work (15–18 lakh transactions monthly; 40+ clients). No client data is published or identifiable. Individual results vary by category, marketplace and return profile. Treat the figures as the size of the problem worth checking for — not a guarantee of recovery. The only way to know your number is to reconcile your own settlements.
Find Your Number — Free
Free Settlement Health Check: send us one recent settlement report and we return a leakage summary priced on your actual data — the wrong slabs, unreversed fees and shipping overcharges in your own file. No obligation. See how our settlement reconciliation services work, then call +91 80944 44888 or write to cs@omaccounting.in.
OM Global Accounting & Advisory (omaccounting.in) — virtual accounting & Virtual CFO for ecommerce sellers across Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Meesho and Shopify. Jaipur, India.