Amazon FBA Due Diligence: Independent Buy-Side Review by CPAs
You're about to spend six figures on numbers a stranger typed into a spreadsheet. We verify them. Fixed fee, delivered inside your diligence window, by a CPA firm that runs Amazon FBA businesses of its own. Buyers in Canada, the US, and anywhere else.
Nobody else in this deal is paid to say "walk away"
The broker earns a commission when the deal closes. The marketplace earns a success fee when the deal closes. Even the due diligence shops they recommend live inside that referral ecosystem.
We don't. Our fee is the same whether you buy the business or run from it. That's the whole point of independent due diligence, and it's surprisingly hard to find: the affordable FBA review services aren't accountants, and the accounting firms that do this work price it for million-dollar deals.
We built this service for the deals that actually happen: $100,000 to $750,000, a three-to-six-week diligence window, and a seller who won't hand out account access.
Why us, specifically
- Our firm sells on Amazon FBA. Settlement reports, fee structures, and landed-cost math are our daily tools, not billable research.
- Chartered Professional Accountants. The review is done by a CPA firm, not a virtual-assistant checklist team.
- E-commerce is the whole practice. Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, and Etsy sellers are who we serve all year. See our Amazon seller accounting practice.
- US and Canadian buyers alike. The financial review works the same wherever you live and wherever the deal is.
- Fixed fees, in writing, before we start.
What we verify
Six workstreams, each tied to a way buyers get burned.
Revenue, settlements to bank
We rebuild revenue from Amazon's own settlement data and match it to bank deposits, month by month, over 24 months. Dashboards and P&Ls are claims. This is evidence.
True landed cost of goods
Supplier invoices plus freight, duty, and prep, rebuilt per unit for the SKUs that carry the business. The margin in the listing and the margin in the paperwork are frequently not the same number.
The expenses that left the P&L
Bank statements against the adjusted P&L, line by line: software, storage, prep centres, insurance, rising ad spend, and the owner's unpaid 20 hours a week.
Wholesale and off-Amazon revenue
Verified separately: invoices to cash, customer concentration, and whether those relationships even transfer with the sale.
Inventory valuation
Unit costs tied to recent purchase documents, aged and stranded stock flagged, so you don't buy dead inventory at full price.
The account itself
Health history, policy warnings, IP complaints, Brand Registry status, review-velocity sanity checks, and 24 months of price and rank history on the core listings.
How it works
- 20-minute call. Deal size, timeline, what's signed. We confirm fee and fit on the call.
- Engagement letter and retainer. Scope in writing before the clock starts. Half the fee up front, half on delivery.
- Document request. One page to the seller, exportable in under an hour. Most turn it around in days.
- Findings report. Delivered inside your window, with a walkthrough call to close it out.
No account access needed
Sellers won't hand out Seller Central logins mid-negotiation, and they don't need to. Every report we rely on can be exported by the seller and sent over: settlement reports, date range reports, sales and traffic by ASIN, FBA fee and storage reports, bank statements, and supplier invoices.
The protection isn't the file format, it's the cross-check. Settlement exports have to tie to actual bank deposits, and faking both consistently for two years is where fabrications fall apart.
If the books live in QuickBooks or Xero, a view-only invite speeds things up. We still verify against the Amazon and bank data rather than taking the books at face value.
Two ways to engage us
Fixed fees in US dollars, quoted before we start. No hourly billing, no surprises.
Deal Screen
- Broker P&L sanity check: margin math, suspicious add-backs, fee ratios against FBA norms
- Price, rank, and Buy Box history on the main listings over 12 to 24 months
- Review velocity and category trend check
- Verdict memo: proceed, proceed with cautions, or walk
Full Financial Due Diligence
- All six verification workstreams above, on 24 months of data
- Findings report with the one-page CLAIMED vs VERIFIED table
- Red flag list with what each one means for price
- Walkthrough call to close out the report
To be clear on form: this is a consulting engagement with a written report of findings, not an audit or review. That's what makes it deliverable inside a typical diligence window.
Buying an FBA business, answered
The diligence window is short.
Start before it opens.
Send us the listing or the LOI and we'll tell you on one call what we'd test first, what it costs, and whether the timeline works.