📅 Settlement Periods – Overview

SellerLegend’s Settlement Periods screens provide a powerful replacement for Amazon Seller Central’s “Payments” section, with much richer data. The interface is split into two levels:

• The Settlement Periods List screen (overview of all payouts)

• The Settlement Period Detail screen (financial breakdown by product, brand, or group)

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🔹 Part 1: Settlement Periods List View

📍 Navigation:
From the main menu, go to Sales and Customers ➝ Settlement Periods

This screen displays a searchable, sortable list of all Amazon settlement periods for your account. Each row corresponds to a unique settlement cycle during which Amazon reconciles your transactions and either transfers funds or holds them in reserve.

✅ What You Can Do Here

• Review payout status and history

• Click into any period to view detailed financials

• Sort by start date, end date, amount paid, or funds transfer status

• Export the table for reconciliation or offline records

🧾 Columns Explained

💡 Tip: The topmost row per marketplace is usually open, meaning Amazon is still accumulating transactions for that payout.

Why You Might See Multiple Open Settlement Periods

Although Amazon typically maintains one open settlement period per marketplace, it is entirely possible — and not uncommon — to see more than one settlement period open at the same time.

Here’s why this can happen:

• Unified Accounts Across Regions: You may have overlapping settlement windows if you’re selling in unified marketplaces (e.g. NA: US/CA/MX).
• Rolling Settlement Schedules: Amazon doesn’t close every settlement exactly at midnight; overlapping cutoffs can result in multiple active periods.
• Account-Specific Payout Settings: If your Amazon account qualifies for faster or customized disbursement cycles, you may have periods that overlap by a few days.
• Delayed Reconciliation or Manual Adjustments: Sometimes Amazon will temporarily re-open a previously closed period to apply retroactive changes like reimbursements or chargebacks, while the next period is already in motion.
• Amazon’s Own Reserve Management Process:

  This is the expected behavior from the Amazon SP-API for seller accounts that have an Account Level Reserve.

  Amazon often holds a portion of a seller’s funds as a reserve to cover potential claims, returns, or chargebacks.

  When a settlement period closes, Amazon splits the funds into two separate groups in their system:

  1. The Payout Group: This group contains the funds that were actually disbursed to the seller. It will have a fund_transfer_status of Succeeded and will include the sales and fees for that period.
  2. The Reserve Group: This group represents the funds being held back by Amazon. It typically has a total_original_amount of zero and a fund_transfer_status of Failed. In this context, “Failed” does not mean there was a bank error; it simply means that no payout was initiated for this group because the balance was intentionally held and rolled over into the next period’s reserve.

  Our system is correctly importing and displaying both of these groups exactly as they are provided by Amazon. For this particular seller account, you can expect to continue seeing this pattern of one payout group and one reserve group for each settlement cycle.

🧠 Bottom line: Multiple open periods are not an error in SellerLegend — they mirror what Amazon reports via their SP-API settlement endpoints.

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🔹 Part 2: Settlement Period Detail View

Clicking on a Settlement Period ID opens the full breakdown for that payout. You’ll see a set of tabs and a granular breakdown of Amazon’s calculations, enriched with SellerLegend’s own data overlays.

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📊 Tab: By Product

Each column represents an ASIN with activity during the period. The rows show metrics grouped into categories such as:

• Sales (Units, Promo/Non-Promo Sales, Returned Units)

• Revenue (Gross Sales, Refunds, Other Income)

• Amazon Fees (Order Fees, Fee Refunds, Other Amazon Charges)

• Promotions (Item and Shipping Promos, Rebates)

• Adjustments (Product Adjustments)

• Profit Calculations (Gross Profit by ASIN and overall)

• SellerLegend Collected Data:

  • Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)

  • VAT

  • Other Operating Expenses

  • Tax

  • PPC Costs

  • Business Expenses

• Bottom Line Metrics:

  • Net Profit

  • Net Margin

  • Net ROI

  • Amazon Payout During Period

💡 Please note: For ‘Other Amazon Fees’, Amazon only provides aggregate numbers by Settlement Period. Therefore, individual fees for products are blank.

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📊 Tab: Summary

The Summary tab offers the same data categories as the By Product tab, but aggregated into a single column representing the entire settlement period.

This view is ideal for:

• High-level reconciliation

• Comparing settlement totals with the SellerLegend P&L

• Spotting anomalies in Amazon payouts

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🏷️ Tab: By Brand

This tab groups data by brand names pulled from your Amazon product listings.

Each column corresponds to a brand that had at least one ASIN involved in a transaction during the period.

Use this to:

• Compare brand profitability

• Attribute VAT and PPC costs to brands

• Understand brand-level refund and fee patterns

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🧩 Tab: By Product Group

This tab uses custom Product Groups defined in SellerLegend (e.g., “Q4 Bestsellers”, “Clearance”, “Premium Line”).

It helps you:

• Monitor product group contribution to revenue

• Attribute operational costs to strategy-level groupings

• View PPC effectiveness by group

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🧠 Key Differences vs Seller Central

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💡 Tips & Best Practices

• Always start with the Summary tab to validate totals

• Use By Product to troubleshoot underperformers or high-fee ASINs

• Use By Brand to track brand-level profitability

• Use By Product Group to report by campaign or product line

• Export the data to Excel for further analysis or to share with finance teams