Does Amazon send my 1099-K to the IRS too?

Yes. Amazon files a copy of your 1099-K with the IRS in addition to sending it to you, so the gross payment figure is already on record before you file. Your reported business income doesn't need to match that number exactly, but you should be able to explain the difference with your expense records.

What if I sell on Amazon and another platform?

You'll likely receive a separate 1099-K from each platform that meets the reporting threshold, such as Amazon, Etsy, or Walmart. Add all of them together as part of your total gross receipts, then apply the same expense-and-fee breakdown to each before calculating net taxable income. If you're wondering where to find your Shopify 1099, it comes from Shopify Payments and lives in the Payments area of your Shopify admin rather than arriving by email, so go looking for it instead of waiting.

Is FBA reimbursement income reported on my 1099-K?

Reimbursements for lost or damaged inventory usually flow through your Amazon payment account, so they can show up in your gross settlement totals. Note that since 2025 Amazon reimburses based on your manufacturing/sourcing cost rather than retail price, so these amounts are typically smaller than sellers expect and should be tracked separately from sales revenue in your books.

I didn't get a 1099-K. Do I still owe taxes on my Amazon income?

Yes. The 1099-K threshold only determines whether Amazon is required to send you the form; it doesn't determine whether you owe tax. All business income is reportable regardless of whether a 1099 was issued.

Why is my 1099-K amount so much higher than what I actually made?

Because it reports gross unadjusted payment volume: total sales before Amazon fees, refunds, shipping, and ad spend are deducted. Your actual profit is calculated separately once those business expenses are subtracted, which is why detailed, fee-level bookkeeping matters at tax time.

Where do I find my 1099-K in Seller Central?

Look under the Tax Document Library in your seller account settings, typically available by late January for the prior year. If you don't see one, either you didn't meet the reporting threshold or your tax information on file is incomplete, and it's worth confirming your taxpayer details either way.

What's the best accounting software for Amazon sellers dealing with a 1099-K?

One that records gross sales, fees, refunds, and reimbursements as separate lines per settlement and posts them to QuickBooks or Xero as balanced entries. BeanHawk, A2X, and Link My Books all do this core job; compare them on refund handling, reserve tracking, and whether SKU-level cost data matters to you. The test that matters: can it produce a gross-sales figure that reconciles to your 1099-K?

Is the Amazon tax exempt form related to my 1099-K?

No, they're different systems that happen to both say "tax." A 1099-K reports income you received. An Amazon tax exempt form, meaning enrollment in Amazon's tax exemption program with your state resale or exemption certificate, is about you buying inventory or supplies without paying sales tax on the purchase. There's no address to mail anything to; you enroll and upload the certificate inside your Amazon account settings. If you use exempt purchases for inventory, keep those receipts organized separately, since a resale certificate used on personal purchases is the kind of thing states do audit.

Do I need an accountant to file with a 1099-K, or can I do it myself?

Sellers with clean, settlement-split books and a single channel often self-file on Schedule C without trouble. Bring in a professional when you have multiple channels, inventory across borders, an entity structure beyond sole proprietor, or books that recorded net deposits as revenue all year, since untangling that mid-filing is where expensive mistakes happen.

Learn · Accounting & bookkeeping

what is a 1099 form

Short answer

A 1099 form is an IRS information return that reports income paid to you outside of a regular paycheck. For Amazon sellers, the relevant one is usually Form 1099-K, which Amazon issues to report your gross unadjusted payment volume for the year. It's not a tax bill; it's a record the IRS also receives, so your reported business income needs to reconcile with it.

Key takeaways

•Box 1a of a 1099-K carries the annual gross amount and the form breaks that total out by month, so a mismatch can be isolated to a single month.
•Refunds reduce your revenue but generally do not reduce the gross figure reported on a 1099-K, which is one reason the two numbers rarely match.
•Not receiving a 1099-K does not remove the obligation to report the income; the threshold only decides whether the platform has to send the form.
•Paying a freelancer $600 or more for services makes you the payer of a 1099-NEC due January 31, and Copy A must be e-filed or the scannable IRS version.
•Books showing far less gross revenue than the 1099-K usually mean net deposits were recorded as sales, which understates both income and expenses.

By Marcus Brandt · Head of Seller Accounting

Updated July 30, 2026

If you sell on Amazon and a 1099-K shows up in Seller Central every January, you're not alone in wondering what it actually means, who else sees it, and whether the number on it is your "real" income. Short answer: it's not, and understanding the difference is the first step to filing correctly.

This guide covers the whole 1099 family briefly, then goes deep on the 1099-K: what's inside the gross number, a worked example showing how a big 1099-K total becomes a much smaller taxable profit, how to reconcile the form against your own records, and what to set up in your amazon bookkeeping so next January is a non-event.

What a 1099 form actually is

A 1099 is a family of IRS information returns used to report payments made to you by someone other than an employer. Instead of a W-2, businesses and platforms that pay you use various 1099 versions depending on the type of income: 1099-NEC for contractor payments, 1099-MISC for things like rent or royalties, and 1099-K for payments processed through a third-party settlement network, which is the one that applies to most Amazon sellers.

There are other members of the family you might meet as a business owner: 1099-INT for interest your business bank account earned, 1099-DIV for dividends, 1099-B for stock and other brokerage sales, and, if you ever sell a corporation you own, Form 1099-CAP for a change in control or capital structure. They all work the same way. A payer reports what they paid you, you get a copy, and the IRS gets a copy.

The key thing to understand: the IRS gets a copy of every 1099 issued to you. If the income you report on your tax return doesn't line up with what's on file, that's a fast track to a mismatch notice. Amazon sellers who also sell on Etsy, Walmart, or eBay may get a separate 1099-K from each platform, and all of them need to be accounted for in your books.

One direction matters here. This article is about 1099s you receive. If you paid a freelancer or VA $600 or more for services during the year, you may also owe them a 1099-NEC as the payer, which is a separate obligation with its own January 31 deadline. One practical trap catches first-time payers: you can't print Copy A of a 1099-NEC off a sample PDF and mail it, because the IRS needs the scannable red-ink version, which you order free from the IRS or replace by e-filing. E-filing is easier and most bookkeeping tools will do it for you. Plenty of sellers sit on both sides of the form in the same tax season.

Form 1099-K and Amazon sellers, specifically

Amazon issues Form 1099-K to report the gross unadjusted payment volume processed through your seller account, meaning the total dollar amount of sales before Amazon fees, refunds, shipping costs, or advertising spend are subtracted. That's a critical distinction: the number on your 1099-K is almost always much higher than your actual taxable profit.

The reporting threshold for who receives a 1099-K has been a moving target. The IRS 1099-K reporting threshold for third-party platforms has been changing in recent years and is being phased rather than fixed at the old $20,000/200-transaction level, so don't assume last year's cutoff still applies. Check the current IRS guidance for the tax year you're filing. In practice, most active Amazon sellers get one regardless of the exact threshold, since gross sales volume adds up fast.

Because the 1099-K reflects gross receipts, your accounting has to bridge the gap between that figure and net profit. That means capturing Amazon's referral fees, FBA fees, advertising, returns, and reimbursements as separate line items rather than lumping everything into one "Amazon deposit" entry.

The form itself is simple to read once you know the layout. Box 1a carries the gross amount for the year, and the form breaks that total down by month. The monthly breakdown is more useful than it looks: it's the fastest way to reconcile the form against your own sales reports, because a discrepancy isolated to one month is far easier to chase down than a full-year mystery. The form also shows the payer's information (Amazon's payment entity, not the retail company you picture) and your taxpayer identification number, which is worth verifying, since a wrong TIN on file with Amazon creates IRS matching problems that take months to unwind. You don't need to hunt down a blank 1099 form example filled out with dummy figures to learn the layout, either. Your own copy in the Tax Document Library is the example, filled out with your numbers, and reading it box by box teaches you more than any template.

See it in BeanHawk

Every settlement becomes one clean journal

BeanHawk parses each marketplace payout line by line and posts a single summarized journal to QuickBooks or Xero — sales, fees, refunds, facilitator tax, and reimbursements mapped to the right accounts, balanced to the penny.

✓Debits equal credits or it won't post — no more deposits booked as revenue
✓Marketplace facilitator tax routed to a liability account, out of your income
✓The net deposit lands in a clearing account that matches your bank feed exactly

See the QuickBooks & Xero sync →

Why the gross number on your 1099-K isn't your profit

A common seller mistake is treating the 1099-K total as taxable income and panicking at the size of the number, or worse, reporting it as-is without backing out expenses. Neither is correct. Your actual taxable income is gross sales minus cost of goods sold, Amazon fees, shipping, advertising, software subscriptions, and other ordinary business expenses.

Run a clearly hypothetical example. Say your 1099-K shows $180,000 in gross payment volume. During the year you refunded $9,000 to customers, Amazon kept roughly $27,000 in referral fees and $22,000 in FBA fulfillment and storage fees, you spent $14,000 on Amazon ads, and the landed cost of the goods you actually sold came to $58,000. Add $6,000 for software, prep supplies, and miscellaneous overhead. Net profit: about $44,000. That's the number income tax is calculated on, not $180,000, and every dollar of the difference needs to exist as a categorized expense in your books rather than a shrug. One more layer applies if you're a sole proprietor or single-member LLC: that net profit also carries self-employment tax, the Social Security and Medicare portion you'd normally split with an employer, which surprises sellers who budgeted only for income tax.

This is where clean books matter more than the tax form itself. If your bookkeeping treats Amazon as a single bank feed transaction, you lose the fee-level detail needed to defend your numbers if the IRS ever asks why your reported income is lower than your 1099-K total. Structuring transactions properly in Amazon accounting in QuickBooks & Xero, separating gross sales, fees, refunds, and reimbursements, is what lets you reconcile confidently instead of guessing.

This gap has grown more relevant as third-party selling has scaled: third-party sellers now account for more than half of the physical gross merchandise sold on Amazon, meaning far more individual sellers are now generating 1099-K-level payment volume than in Amazon's early years, and far more of them need to understand this distinction.

How to reconcile your 1099-K against your own records

Don't just file the form away. Reconcile it. Pull a date-range report from Seller Central covering January 1 through December 31 and compare its gross sales figure to Box 1a, month by month against the form's monthly boxes. The two won't always match to the penny, and the usual suspects are timing (a sale processed December 31 but settled January 2), amounts like shipping or tax passed through the payment flow, and refunds, which reduce your revenue but generally don't reduce the gross figure the 1099-K reports.

If you find a real discrepancy that isn't explained by timing or gross-versus-net definitions, contact Seller Support and ask for a corrected form before you file. It happens rarely, but a materially wrong 1099-K is worth fixing at the source rather than explaining away on a return.

Then reconcile the other direction: your books against the form. Your ledger's gross sales for the year should land within explainable distance of the 1099-K. If your books show dramatically less, you've probably been recording net deposits as revenue, which understates both income and expenses. That's the single most common bookkeeping error among marketplace sellers, and finding it in February beats finding it during an audit.

Keep the reconciliation itself as a saved workpaper: the date-range report, the form, and a one-page bridge from gross to net. If a mismatch notice ever arrives, that single document answers it in one reply instead of a summer of correspondence.

1099s, sales tax, and other reporting sellers confuse

Sellers sometimes conflate income tax reporting (1099-K) with sales tax collection, but they're separate systems. Since the Supreme Court's Wayfair decision, states can require sellers to collect sales tax based on economic nexus rather than physical presence, and nearly all states with a sales tax now have marketplace facilitator laws that shift the collect-and-remit duty onto Amazon itself for marketplace sales. That means Amazon is generally handling sales tax collection on your behalf, but it has nothing to do with the income figures on your 1099-K, which are strictly about federal income reporting.

Keeping these threads separate (income tax via 1099-K, sales tax via marketplace facilitator rules, and inventory-related items like FBA reimbursements) avoids the mixed-up bookkeeping that causes most year-end filing headaches.

Getting your books 1099-ready before January

Everything above gets dramatically easier with the right structure in place before year-end. The goal is simple: every Amazon settlement in your ledger split into gross sales, refunds, fees, ad spend, and reimbursements, posted in the period it happened, tying to the bank deposit to the penny.

You can build that by hand in a spreadsheet at low volume, and plenty of sellers do for their first year. Past a few settlements a month, an amazon quickbooks integration or an amazon xero connector that posts summarized journal entries per settlement is the standard fix. Purpose-built amazon accounting software (compare BeanHawk, A2X, and Link My Books on how they handle refunds, reserves, and month-end cutoffs) automates the splitting so your ecommerce accounting matches the 1099-K's gross-basis view while your P&L shows true net profit.

Whichever tool you land on, the January test is the same: can you produce, in under an hour, a report showing gross sales that reconciles to your 1099-K and a P&L that shows how that gross became your net? If yes, the form is paperwork. If no, fix the books before fixing anything else.

Frequently asked questions

Does Amazon send my 1099-K to the IRS too?: Yes. Amazon files a copy of your 1099-K with the IRS in addition to sending it to you, so the gross payment figure is already on record before you file. Your reported business income doesn't need to match that number exactly, but you should be able to explain the difference with your expense records.
What if I sell on Amazon and another platform?: You'll likely receive a separate 1099-K from each platform that meets the reporting threshold, such as Amazon, Etsy, or Walmart. Add all of them together as part of your total gross receipts, then apply the same expense-and-fee breakdown to each before calculating net taxable income. If you're wondering where to find your Shopify 1099, it comes from Shopify Payments and lives in the Payments area of your Shopify admin rather than arriving by email, so go looking for it instead of waiting.
Is FBA reimbursement income reported on my 1099-K?: Reimbursements for lost or damaged inventory usually flow through your Amazon payment account, so they can show up in your gross settlement totals. Note that since 2025 Amazon reimburses based on your manufacturing/sourcing cost rather than retail price, so these amounts are typically smaller than sellers expect and should be tracked separately from sales revenue in your books.
I didn't get a 1099-K. Do I still owe taxes on my Amazon income?: Yes. The 1099-K threshold only determines whether Amazon is required to send you the form; it doesn't determine whether you owe tax. All business income is reportable regardless of whether a 1099 was issued.
Why is my 1099-K amount so much higher than what I actually made?: Because it reports gross unadjusted payment volume: total sales before Amazon fees, refunds, shipping, and ad spend are deducted. Your actual profit is calculated separately once those business expenses are subtracted, which is why detailed, fee-level bookkeeping matters at tax time.
Where do I find my 1099-K in Seller Central?: Look under the Tax Document Library in your seller account settings, typically available by late January for the prior year. If you don't see one, either you didn't meet the reporting threshold or your tax information on file is incomplete, and it's worth confirming your taxpayer details either way.
What's the best accounting software for Amazon sellers dealing with a 1099-K?: One that records gross sales, fees, refunds, and reimbursements as separate lines per settlement and posts them to QuickBooks or Xero as balanced entries. BeanHawk, A2X, and Link My Books all do this core job; compare them on refund handling, reserve tracking, and whether SKU-level cost data matters to you. The test that matters: can it produce a gross-sales figure that reconciles to your 1099-K?
Is the Amazon tax exempt form related to my 1099-K?: No, they're different systems that happen to both say "tax." A 1099-K reports income you received. An Amazon tax exempt form, meaning enrollment in Amazon's tax exemption program with your state resale or exemption certificate, is about you buying inventory or supplies without paying sales tax on the purchase. There's no address to mail anything to; you enroll and upload the certificate inside your Amazon account settings. If you use exempt purchases for inventory, keep those receipts organized separately, since a resale certificate used on personal purchases is the kind of thing states do audit.
Do I need an accountant to file with a 1099-K, or can I do it myself?: Sellers with clean, settlement-split books and a single channel often self-file on Schedule C without trouble. Bring in a professional when you have multiple channels, inventory across borders, an entity structure beyond sole proprietor, or books that recorded net deposits as revenue all year, since untangling that mid-filing is where expensive mistakes happen.