Ecommerce business expenses in Australia: GST on imports, low-value goods, and platform fees

An Australian online seller buys most of its stock offshore and pays most of its platform fees to companies billed from overseas. That makes the GST treatment of imports, and of those foreign fees, the part of the books that goes wrong most often. The threshold that governs imported stock is A$1,000, and which side of it a shipment falls on changes who charges the GST and how you claim it back. All figures below are sourced from ATO guidance in the Sources section.

GST on imported stock: the A$1,000 line

Low-value imported goods are physical goods with a customs value of A$1,000 or less, and a GST-registered overseas supplier charges GST on them at the point of sale ^[1] . Above A$1,000, GST is instead collected at the border when the goods are imported ^[2] .

Overseas suppliers must register and charge GST once their low-value sales to Australian consumers reach A$75,000 in a 12-month period ^[1] . For a domestic seller importing bulk stock, most commercial shipments exceed A$1,000, so border GST is the usual case.

Claiming the import GST credit

If you are registered, you claim an input tax credit for the GST on imported goods used in your business. Where GST is paid at the border, you claim it on your activity statement using the import declaration, not the supplier’s invoice ^[2] . Where the overseas supplier charged GST at point of sale on a low-value parcel, keep the evidence so the same GST is not applied again at the border ^[1] . The discipline is the same either way: the supplier invoice records the cost of goods, and the GST credit hangs off the import document.

Marketplace and payment-processor fees

Selling and processing fees (Amazon, Shopify, Stripe, PayPal) are operating expenses, not cost of goods sold. If the platform is registered for Australian GST, its fees carry GST you claim as a credit; if the fee is an imported service from an unregistered overseas supplier, the Division 84 reverse charge may apply and you self-assess the GST ^[2] . The tax invoice and the supplier’s ABN tell you which.

Cost of goods versus operating expenses

Cost of goods sold is the stock purchase price plus inbound freight and import duty. Marketplace fees, advertising, subscriptions, and packaging are operating costs. The split is easy to blur when stock and fees both land as foreign-currency charges in the same month, but it is what gross-margin reporting depends on.

Where ExpenseFlow fits

Ecommerce generates a constant stream of cross-border invoices in multiple currencies. ExpenseFlow captures each receipt and tax invoice, extracts the line detail and the currency, and syncs the transaction into Xero or QuickBooks Online with the source image attached for the five-year record-keeping window. Its cross-border checks flag a purchase from a foreign supplier that has not charged Australian GST, so it is recorded as a foreign-currency cost rather than wrongly treated as carrying a claimable credit, and they point you to the import declaration as the document on which the import GST credit is actually claimed. It does not calculate import GST, lodge your BAS, or split cost of goods from operating expenses: those stay with you or your accountant. What it removes is the manual keying and currency handling behind a busy online ledger.

Common mistakes

• Claiming the import GST credit from the overseas supplier’s invoice instead of the import declaration ^[2] .
• Letting GST be charged twice, once at sale and again at the border, by not keeping evidence that a low-value supplier already applied it ^[1] .
• Assuming all platform fees carry a claimable GST credit when imported-service fees may fall under the Division 84 reverse charge ^[2] .
• Folding selling and processing fees into cost of goods, which distorts gross margin.