What Is TCS Under GST for E-commerce Sellers?

If you sell through Amazon, Flipkart, or Meesho, you’ve probably noticed a "TCS" deduction on every settlement and wondered where that money actually goes.

Under Section 52 of the CGST Act, e-commerce operators are required to collect 1% of the net taxable value of supplies made through their platform, and deposit it with the government on your behalf. This isn’t an extra cost to you in the way commission is — it’s tax you would have owed anyway, collected upfront rather than paid separately.

The 1% typically splits as 0.5% CGST + 0.5% SGST for intra-state sales, or 1% IGST for inter-state sales. The marketplace reports this collection to the government, and it appears in your GSTR-2B as available credit — you claim it back when filing your GST returns.

The practical risk isn’t the deduction itself, it’s reconciliation: the TCS deducted in your settlement report needs to match what actually shows up in your GSTR-2B. If a marketplace misreports or delays a TCS entry, you can end up unable to claim credit you’re rightfully owed — and the only way to catch that early is comparing your settlement-level TCS figures against your GST filings, not just trusting the total.

This is exactly the kind of mismatch that’s invisible until you’re looking at order-level data side by side — which is why TCS tracking is one of the fields Settlr pulls out explicitly in every reconciliation, rather than folding it into a generic "deductions" bucket.