Every Amazon business for sale comes with a P&L, and most come with dashboard screenshots. Neither one is evidence. A P&L is a spreadsheet someone typed, a screenshot is a picture, and edited PDFs come up again and again in FBA deals that went bad. If you’re spending six figures, revenue gets verified from source data or it doesn’t count.
Screenshots aren’t source documents
The broker package typically shows the Seller Central sales dashboard. The dashboard reports ordered product sales, which is gross demand, not money. It ignores refunds that come later, it says nothing about fees, and it can be cropped to flattering date ranges.
Sellers with something to hide rarely fake the whole business. They shade it: a revenue line that quietly includes reimbursements, a “trailing twelve months” that starts right after a bad quarter, a second product line blended in that isn’t part of the sale.
Settlement reports are where the truth lives
Amazon produces a settlement report for every payout period. It’s the closest thing to a bank statement Amazon issues: gross sales, refunds, every fee category, reserves, and the exact amount Amazon deposited. The first thing we request on any engagement is every settlement report covering 24 months. A seller can export them in minutes without giving anyone access to the account, so reluctance here tells you something all by itself.
Rebuilt from settlements, revenue often comes out lower than the listing claims. Sometimes the gap is innocent framing, gross instead of net. Sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the price should be negotiated from the settlement number.
Then follow it into the bank
The settlement reports say what Amazon paid out. The bank statements say what actually arrived, and we match one to the other, payout by payout, across a couple of years. That’s the test a fabricated P&L rarely survives. It also surfaces things you’d never spot otherwise: deposits from marketplaces that aren’t part of the deal, transfers dressed up as sales, or a “wholesale channel” with no corresponding money coming in.
This is accountant work, and that’s exactly the point. It’s tedious, there are dozens of places where a settlement and a deposit legitimately differ (reserves, currency, timing), and knowing which gaps are innocent and which aren’t is the skill. It’s the reason a buyer’s accountant finds problems that a buyer reading the listing never will.
Watch the cash-basis trap
Even honest numbers can mislead when the P&L is on a cash basis. Inventory is the problem: an FBA seller who stopped reordering stock looks wildly profitable for six months while inventory sells down, and the listing goes to market on exactly those six months. We re-read profit on an accrual basis, with cost of goods matched to the units actually sold and the inventory position trending alongside it. A shrinking inventory balance next to rising “profit” is one of the clearest warning signs there is, and it’s invisible on a cash P&L.
Frequently asked questions
How do I verify an Amazon business’s revenue before buying it?
The only reliable way is reconciling 24 months of settlement data through to bank deposits, payout by payout. It’s mechanical accounting work with plenty of places to go wrong, and it’s the core of our due diligence engagement. Anything the seller claims that can’t survive that chain gets priced out of the deal. What we test beyond revenue is in our FBA due diligence checklist.
Can sellers fake their Amazon P&L?
Yes, and it happens. Spreadsheets and PDF exports are trivially editable, and doctored P&Ls are a documented pattern in online business sales. Settlement data plus bank statements is the antidote, because faking both consistently for two years is a different order of difficulty.
Is cash or accrual accounting better for evaluating an FBA business?
Accrual. Cash P&Ls swing with inventory purchases and hide sell-down periods that flatter profit. Many broker P&Ls need converting before the earnings number means anything.
Do I need access to the seller’s Amazon account?
No. Every report that matters can be exported by the seller and handed over. 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. We run full engagements from exported settlement data, bank statements, and supplier invoices.
Related guides
- Amazon FBA due diligence (our buy-side review service)
- Amazon FBA due diligence checklist: what a CPA verifies before you buy
- Buying an FBA business in Canada: asset sale or share sale?
- Accounting for Amazon sellers
- E-commerce bookkeeping
Have a P&L you’re not sure about?
We verify FBA and e-commerce acquisitions for buyers on a fixed fee, inside your diligence window, and our firm sells on Amazon so the reports read like home. Send us the deal and we’ll tell you what we’d test first.
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