Compare Your Rate Card With Actual Fees Per Order

Start with the right documents

You cannot audit fees without a source of truth. Collect these before you open a spreadsheet:

• Seller agreement and annexures: the signed terms that define commission, fixed fees, shipping and return charges.
• Current rate card: download the latest version from your seller panel and save a dated copy. Rate cards change, so also keep earlier versions.
• Settlement reports: the order-level files for the period you are checking, not just the summary payout.
• Order and returns data: selling price, category, size or weight band, order date, delivery date and return status.
• Email or portal notices: any written fee changes, promotional commission waivers or negotiated exceptions.

If the agreement and the portal rate card disagree, note it. That difference is itself something to raise with your account manager.

Turn the rate card into checkable rules

A rate card is usually a mix of percentages, slabs and flat amounts. Convert each line into a rule you can calculate. For every fee type, write down:

• What it is based on (selling price, MRP, invoice value, weight, category, region).
• Whether it is a percentage, a flat amount or a slab.
• The date from which it applies and any end date.
• Whether tax is charged on top, and how it appears in the report.

Do not copy rates from blogs or old emails. Take every rate and tax treatment from your own agreement, the current rate card or your tax adviser, and confirm the latest terms before each audit cycle.

Pull per-order fee lines from the settlement report

Next, build one row per order with the fees the marketplace actually deducted. Most settlement files list commission, fixed or closing fee, shipping or logistics fee, collection or payment fee, and adjustments in separate columns. Map these to the rules from the previous step.

1. Join the settlement report with your order data using the order or item ID.
2. Keep one row per order item, since a multi-item order can have different categories and fee bases.
3. Separate fee lines from tax lines so you compare like with like.
4. Mark returned, cancelled and exchanged orders, because they often carry different fee logic.

Recalculate the expected fee and measure variance

Add expected-fee columns beside the charged ones and compute the difference for each fee type. Then:

1. Calculate expected fee from your rule, the order's attributes and the rate card valid on the order date.
2. Compute variance = charged minus expected for each fee line.
3. Set a small rounding tolerance and flag anything beyond it.
4. Sort by total rupee impact and by frequency, since a small error repeated across thousands of orders matters more than one large outlier.

Treat a positive variance as a possible overcharge and a negative one as something to understand, since it may signal a waiver you should know about or a later reversal.

Common reasons actual fees differ

Group flagged orders by cause so you can fix patterns rather than chase single rows. Typical causes to check:

• Wrong category mapping: the product is listed under a category with a different commission.
• Wrong price base: the fee is computed on a different value than your agreement specifies.
• Weight or size band errors: shipping charged for a heavier slab than the actual shipment.
• Outdated or wrong rate card version: a new rate applied before its effective date.
• Return and cancellation charges: fees applied where the terms say they should be reversed or not charged.
• Duplicate or unexplained adjustments: the same charge appearing twice or an adjustment with no reference.

Raise disputes with evidence and repeat monthly

For each cause, prepare a short dispute pack: the relevant agreement clause or rate card page, a list of affected order IDs, the charged and expected amounts, and the total claim. Submit through the channel your marketplace specifies and track the case until a credit or a written rejection comes back.

Do this every settlement cycle, not once a year. Manual spreadsheets work for a few hundred orders; at scale, a tool such as MarketplaceMetrics by Fundle can reconcile sales and settlements, check commissions and fees against agreed terms, and track returns and recovery cases. Myntra Excel reports are reviewed today, and support for other marketplaces is a scoping discussion.