Payments, VAT and reporting across every channel

The unglamorous half of running a shop. Nobody chooses a platform for its VAT handling, and everybody regrets one that got it wrong.

Taking payment

Card payments go through Stripe, so card details never touch Qwikr and never touch you. That is not a feature so much as the absence of a liability: the safest way to handle a card number is to never receive one.

Trade customers are the exception, because they mostly do not pay by card. An approved account with terms and a credit limit can order against those terms, with overdue balances chased automatically rather than depending on somebody remembering.

VAT, and why it is not one number

VAT depends on what the product is, where the customer is, and whether they are a business. Children’s clothing, books and most food are zero-rated in the UK; a trade customer with a valid registration in another country is a different calculation again.

Getting it wrong is not a rounding error, it is a filing that has to be corrected. So rates are held per product and applied by rule rather than as a single site-wide percentage, and invoices show the breakdown a customer’s accountant will ask for.

Accounting, without rekeying

Orders, refunds and payouts sync to your accounting system so the same transaction is not entered twice by two people who each think the other did it. Marketplace payouts are the awkward ones — a single deposit that bundles many orders, their fees and their refunds — and they need reconciling to the orders inside them rather than posting as one lump.

Reporting that answers the question you asked

Most ecommerce dashboards report revenue by day, which is the number you already know. The useful ones answer harder questions: which channel is actually profitable after fees, which products return most often, what a customer is worth over a year rather than an order.

Because every channel’s orders land in one system, those questions can be asked across all of them at once — which is the whole reason for the orders being in one place.

Being able to leave

Products, orders and customers export on every plan, including the trial. An export you cannot run is a lock-in you have not noticed yet, and a platform confident in its own product does not need the door jammed shut.