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.
