Why TRANSACTION_AMOUNT is not your revenue (and what to use instead)

Open any Whatnot weekly earnings report and the column that looks like “the sales number” is TRANSACTION_AMOUNT. It is on every order row, it is in dollars, it adds up to something plausible. Nearly everyone sums it and calls it revenue.

It is your payout: what Whatnot sent you after taking its commission, the payment processing fee, any shipping deduction, and tax on the fees. The identity holds on every row of the report:

TRANSACTION_AMOUNT = item price − commission − processing − shipping deducted − tax on fees

Two things go wrong when you treat it as revenue.

Mistake 1: your “sales” are understated

Sum payouts and you have understated gross sales by the fee total — 12.6% of sales in two years of sample data. If you compare that figure to what Whatnot’s dashboard shows, or to what a 1099-K reports, nothing reconciles. And your Schedule C Line 1 is wrong in the direction that also loses you a deduction.

Fix: gross sales = POST_COUPON_PRICE, or ORIGINAL_ITEM_PRICE plus COUPON_COST (the coupon is stored as a negative) on older reports.

Mistake 2: you subtract the fees twice

The more expensive mistake. Spreadsheet logic that feels right:

Net = TRANSACTION_AMOUNT − COMMISSION_FEE − PAYMENT_PROCESSING_FEE − cost of goods

But the payout already has those fees taken out. Subtracting them again understates your net by the entire fee total — about 13% of sales.

We did exactly this. An earlier version of MARGN.PLUS defined gross as the sum of payouts, then subtracted the fee columns to get net. Every seller’s profit was low by about 13% of their sales. Our own test shop showed a net of $21,324 for a year that was really about $32,300. The arithmetic was flawless; the definition was wrong. We found it by rebuilding the numbers from raw CSV rows and checking the fee identity — then recomputed every stored week.

Fix: net = payout − cost of goods − giveaway costs − refunds − platform charges + tips. The fees are already gone from the payout; show them as line items, never subtract them.

The three numbers, side by side

For the $25 item with $6.99 buyer shipping:

Say “gross,” “payout,” and “net” and mean these three things, and every conversation with your preparer, your spreadsheet, and your own head gets simpler.

A five-minute spreadsheet fix

1. Add a column Sale price = POST_COUPON_PRICE, falling back to ORIGINAL_ITEM_PRICE + COUPON_COST.
2. Gross = sum of Sale price for rows where TRANSACTION_TYPE = ORDER_EARNINGS and TRANSACTION_AMOUNT > 0.
3. Fees = gross − sum of TRANSACTION_AMOUNT for those rows. (Yes, that simple — the difference is the fees, tax on fees included.)
4. Net = sum of TRANSACTION_AMOUNT − your COGS − |giveaway rows| − |refund rows| − |SHIPPING_CHARGE rows| + tips.

Or upload the file to MARGN.PLUS, which does precisely this and shows every definition on the dashboard, so nothing is implied.

MARGN.PLUS is independent and not affiliated with Whatnot, Inc. Whatnot is a trademark of Whatnot, Inc.