Once a week, Whatnot posts a weekly earnings report you can download from Seller Hub → Finances → Your Statements and Reports → Weekly Earnings Report. It is a thorough file: 34 columns covering every order, fee, buyer and show. Most sellers open it once, see a wall of IDs and timestamps, and close it. That is a shame, because the answers to “how much did I really make?”, “who are my regulars?”, and “what do I owe in taxes?” are all in there. Whatnot did the hard part by recording all of it. This is the reading guide.
This is a column-by-column guide. Nothing here is opinion. It comes from parsing thousands of real rows.
First, how the file is organized
- One row is one ledger transaction, not one order. An order that earns you money is one row. A tip is another row. A refund is another row. A giveaway is a row with a small negative amount (Whatnot deducts the shipping label).
- Weeks run Monday to Sunday, and the report is keyed to when a transaction completed, the payout date, not when the buyer placed the order. Orders you shipped late in one week often show up in the next week’s file.
- Timestamps are UTC. If you sell evenings in the US, your Thursday-night show is dated Friday in the file. Any tool that shows you “sales by hour” has to convert this.
The columns that identify things
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
REPORT_START_DATE |
The Monday the report covers. |
WEEK_NUMBER |
ISO week number of that Monday. |
ORDER_ID |
Whatnot’s order number. The same order can appear on more than one row (earnings, then a refund). |
LEDGER_TRANSACTION_ID |
The unique ID of this row. If you ever merge files, this is the key that prevents double counting. |
SELLER_ID |
Your numeric seller ID. Same on every row. |
SHIPMENT_ID |
The shipment the order went out in. |
LIVESTREAM_ID / LIVESTREAM_TITLE |
The show the sale is attributed to. Watch out: buy-it-now sales from a preloaded show page are attributed to that show even when they happen hours before you go live. |
SKU |
Whatever you typed as the SKU. Blank or junk on a lot of rows, which matters if you use it to track cost. |
The columns that describe the sale
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
TRANSACTION_TYPE |
ORDER_EARNINGS (a sale), TIP, REFUND, SHIPPING_CHARGE (a shipping adjustment charged to you). |
BUY_FORMAT |
AUCTION, BUY_IT_NOW, or GIVEAWAY. |
SALE_TYPE |
LIVESTREAM, or a flash-sale variant. Flash sales are buy-it-now rows with a flash sale type. Count them once. |
LISTING_TITLE / LISTING_DESCRIPTION |
What you listed. The description can be long and contain line breaks, which is why the file sometimes looks “broken” in Excel. |
PRODUCT_CATEGORY |
Whatnot’s category for the listing. Good for seeing which corner of your inventory earns. |
QUANTITY_SOLD |
Usually 1. Bundles and multi-quantity listings are more than 1, so “items sold” and “orders” are not the same number. |
COST_OF_GOODS |
Only filled in if you entered a cost when listing. Blank means “unknown”, not “free”. Any profit figure that treats blank as zero is flattering you. |
The buyer columns
BUYER_NAME (their Whatnot handle), BUYER_STATE, BUYER_COUNTRY. These are real people’s purchase records. Whatever you do with the file, treat them that way.
The money columns, and the one that isn’t what it looks like
This is the part that trips up nearly everyone, including analytics tools.
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
ORIGINAL_ITEM_PRICE |
The price the item sold for. |
COUPON_COST |
If a coupon applied, the discount, written as a negative number. |
POST_COUPON_PRICE |
Price after the coupon. This is the sale price the buyer actually paid for the item. (Older reports leave it blank; use original price plus coupon.) |
BUYER_PAID |
Item price plus the shipping the buyer paid. |
COMMISSION_FEE |
Whatnot’s commission: 8% of the item price. |
PAYMENT_PROCESSING_FEE |
2.9% of what the buyer paid (item plus shipping) plus $0.30. Not 2.9% of the item price. |
SHIPPING_FEE |
Shipping cost deducted from you on that row (usually zero when the buyer pays shipping; the buyer’s shipping goes toward the label, not to you). |
TAX_ON_COMMISSION_FEE, TAX_ON_PAYMENT_PROCESSING_FEE |
Sales tax on the fees themselves, where it applies. Small. |
TRANSACTION_AMOUNT |
Your payout for the row: price minus commission, minus processing, minus shipping deductions, minus tax on fees. |
That last line is the one to remember. TRANSACTION_AMOUNT is what landed in your account, not your revenue. Two mistakes follow from misreading it:
- Adding it up and calling it “sales.” Your sales are
POST_COUPON_PRICE(or original price plus coupon). Summing payouts understates your gross by the fee total: 12.6% of sales in two years of sample data. - Subtracting fees from it. Since it is already net of every fee, subtracting
COMMISSION_FEEandPAYMENT_PROCESSING_FEEagain charges you twice. Your real net is: payout − cost of goods − giveaway costs − refunds + tips. (We made exactly this mistake in an early version of MARGN.PLUS. It understated profit by about 13% of sales until we checked the arithmetic on 8,000-plus real rows.)
Rows that aren’t sales
- Tips have
TRANSACTION_TYPE = TIP, no order ID, and the tip amount as the transaction amount. They are income. - Refunds are negative amounts. Subtract them.
- Giveaways have
BUY_FORMAT = GIVEAWAYand a small negative amount: the shipping label Whatnot charged you. That is your giveaway cost, and it is a legitimate business expense. - Shipping adjustments (
SHIPPING_CHARGE) are negative and easy to miss because they attach to no listing. Over a year they add up to real money.
Three things worth doing with the file
- Keep every week. The files don’t overlap by ledger ID, so a folder of weekly CSVs is a complete, exact ledger of your business.
- Fill in
COST_OF_GOODSat listing time. It is the difference between knowing your margin and guessing it. - Never edit the CSV in Excel and save it back. Excel reformats dates and strips leading zeros; the file stops importing anywhere.
If you’d rather not do any of this by hand, that is literally what MARGN.PLUS is for: drop the weekly file in and it computes gross, fees, payout, and real net per week, per show, per buyer, using exactly the definitions above.
MARGN.PLUS is independent and not affiliated with Whatnot, Inc. Whatnot is a trademark of Whatnot, Inc. Fee figures reflect Whatnot’s US fee schedule as observed in 2026 reports; confirm against your own statements.
