We’re defining all of the Amazon terminologies that you need for a full understanding of the Amazon payments report.
What’s Included in the Payments Report
The Payments report displays your account’s payment information. You can…
- View an account summary that includes beginning balance, next scheduled date for transfer of funds, and order and refund totals.
- View credits, fees, and adjustments for specific orders.
- Download a report containing all your transactions for a selected date range.
Payments Summary: Statement View
This page summarizes your payment information which shows your current total balance, available funds, and recent payouts across all account types.
Statement View General Terminologies
Account reserve: Account reserve includes funds in your account that will not be disbursed within the selected settlement period. Your account reserve is used to cover potential claims or chargebacks.
Available funds: Available funds in your account for a given settlement period include the beginning balance amount plus income, less any negative balance repayment, expenses, refunds, and account reserve.
Balance repayment: Balance repayment is a credit made to your account using your charge method for a balance you owe. This type of balance appears when your sales are less than your fees and charges for the selected settlement period, and Amazon Payments couldn’t charge your charge method on file.
Beginning balance: Beginning balance includes the amount withheld in your account reserve from the previous statement, and any amount carried over from the previous balance.
Expenses: Expenses include processing fees, cross-border fees, authorization fees, chargeback fees, and any applicable provider fees.
Income: Income is calculated based on the gross amount from settled sales that occurred during the selected settlement.
Statement View Graph Terminologies
Beginning Balance: The amount carried over from the previous settlement period including account level reserves and failed disbursements (if any).
Sales: The amount generated through your orders, consisting of:
- Product Charges: Your price multiplied by the quantity sold.
- Shipping: Collected from customers to cover shipment of orders.
- Tax: Sales tax collected from customers.
- Promo Rebates: Charges for any promotion rebates.
- Other: This includes, but is not limited to, FBA inventory reimbursements and gift wrap credits.
Refunds:
- Refunded Expenses: The amount covering fees charged by Amazon and promo rebates.
- Refunded Sales: The amount covering customer order payments such as product sales, shipping, gift wrap, concessions, and tax.
Expenses: Charges made to your account consisting of:
- Amazon Fees: This includes, but is not limited to, referral fees, monthly professional selling fee (if applicable), FBA fulfillment fees, chargebacks for shipping, and gift wrap.
- FBA Fees: This includes, but is not limited to non-order fees such as storage of inventory at our fulfillment centers, removal order, and reimbursement and balance adjustments.
- Cost of Advertising: The cost incurred for advertising.
- Other: Miscellaneous charges which can include coupon redemption fees and Amazon Lending payments.
Account Level Reserves: The amount of money that is reserved to ensure that you have enough funds to fulfill any claims or chargebacks.
Payments Summary: Transaction View
Transaction View shows account transactions related to customer orders, refunds, and Amazon-initiated charges or credit.
Transaction View Terminologies (Transaction Types)
Note: Amazon has recently updated the transaction view. Transaction view now displays 4 additional columns- Channel, OrderType, PaymentType, and TotalFee. Amazon does not display these additional columns in downloadable reports, in order to allow sellers to process reports as usual.
Deferred Transactions: This shows transactions that will be paid out to you on a future date. Most transactions are deferred for some period of time before they are paid out.
Disbursements: This shows the amount paid out in each settlement period to your account and the status of your funds.
- This page also contains Settlement Reports. These reports provide information on all financial transactions for the settlement period, including customer orders, refunds, and Amazon-initiated charges or credit.
Date Range Report: This generates individual transaction reports and summary reports for all transactions within a specified date range.
A-to-Z Guarantee Claim: Payment refunded from merchant to customer because of an Amazon Pay Amazon Pay A-to-z Guarantee claim.
- Claim may be due to timeliness of the order, condition of items received, receipt of items, and items returned without a refund from the merchant.
Capture: Payment is requested to be taken from merchant financial institution, and deposited into Amazon account.
- Generally, Amazon Pay first settles your account 14 days after the first business days on which the corresponding transaction was captured.
Chargeback: A chargeback occurs when your customer contacts their bank or credit card company to dispute the charge for an order that they placed on your website.
Refund: Payment returned to a customer by the merchant. Refunds include the amount from reversal of sales or expense such as Amazon Pay fees.
Miscellaneous fees: Includes authorisation expired (AuthExpired), authorisation cancelled (AuthCancelled), and chargeback fees.
Payments Reports (Report Types)
Long-Term Storage Charges: Itemized details of your most recent Long-Term Storage Fee charges to allow you to identify which of your Units in Amazon fulfillment centers were charged the Long-Term Storage Fee and review the amounts charged. The report includes product details, quantity, per Unit volume and the total amount for each SKU to which the fee was applied.
Reimbursements: Itemized details of your FBA reimbursements including reimbursements initiated by you and reimbursements that were generated automatically. For reimbursements you requested, a Case ID is included in the report entry. You can click the Case ID to go to the Case Details.
Payments Statement View: A simplified display of details by each order using a Microsoft Excel pivot table.
Payments Transactions View: A summary view of the transactions that have occurred in the account since the last settlement date up until closing on the previous day
Payments Report (Column Names)
Settlement: Batch of transactions for a merchant, which have been paid out and may span multiple banking institutions (like credit cards and bank accounts) and dates, and can be traced to order IDs or Transaction IDs. A settlement report lets a merchant trace individual customer transactions to bank deposits.
Total Fee: Sum of all fees charged, i.e. transaction fixed fees + transaction percentage fees, as well as other fees.
Transaction: A transaction is monetary movement from one financial institution to another.
TransactionPercentageFee: The processing fee Amazon Pay charges for successful transactions.
TransactionFixedFee: Authorization fees charged for the transaction regardless of the order amount.
PaymentType: The payment instrument used for the transaction.
TransactionType: The column shows which type of transaction the data in the row refers to. It can show, capture, dispute, reserve, authorization fees, debt, adjustments and provider credit related transactions.
Channel: Platform used during checkout.
OrderType: The order type can be one-time or recurring (billing agreement).
Account: A unique, password-protected, merchant identifier that has the individual, business, financial institution, and other information for a business that sells a product or service.
Other Payment Terms
Adjustments: A credit or a debit — any adjustment toward regular money movement resulting from a specific transaction activity like a debt.
Authorised: This transaction status means the issuing bank has authorised transaction amount.
Authorisation fee: Any per-transaction authorisation fees which expired or were canceled.
Canceled: Transaction status when the order has been cancelled before money is paid out.
Captured: Transaction status when the money has been submitted for processing by the issuing bank.
Carryover: A credit or debit, depending on the un-disbursed account balance for a specific settlement period.
Chargeback fee: The Disputed Chargeback fee for representation is $20 per chargeback; Amazon Pay will build, present, and maintain your case with the credit card company or bank.
Closing balance: The amount of money remaining in your Amazon Pay account at the close of a statement period.
Debt: Money that is owed to Amazon, and has not been paid by the merchant.
- Before funds are disbursed, Amazon charges the debt from the total amount, excluding any additional reserves. If a current payment instrument (such as a credit or debit card) is in Seller Central, your debt will be automatically charged. To remove debt, log into Seller Central, and update your payment instrument. When a debt has been paid, it shows in a transaction view, or in a date range report. Look in the transaction type column, and in the debt row. It will show up as a positive credit to your account.
Other (shipping & gift wrap credits): Various miscellaneous credits.
Processing fees: The standard processing fee that Amazon charges merchants, depending on the merchant’s geographical location and contract.
Reserves: Sales withheld, due to Amazon Pay reserve policy.
Unavailable balance: Amount not available for payout, due to reserves, bad debt, or some other reason.
Settled: Transaction status when the money has been cleared for distribution by the issuing bank.
*All definitions are directly from Amazon’s resources…
Sources:
https://pay.amazon.com/help/201212310
