Bookkeeping

FreeTaxUSA costs a self-employed store owner about $15.99 to file federal and one state in 2026. The same return at e-file.com costs $82.98. Here are the verified prices for both, the IRS Free File rules that may make both irrelevant, and the three narrow situations where paying more for e-file.com is still the right call.

Already looking at e-file.com? Here are 8 alternatives that beat it, organized by the exact problem each one solves, with 2026 prices verified against live vendor pages.

A verified 2026 price and feature comparison of e-file.com and TurboTax for self-employed store owners filing a Schedule C with one state return, including where the expensive option genuinely wins and when IRS Free File beats both.

The exact order to file taxes as an ecommerce seller: which documents to gather, how to reconcile a 1099-K against real deposits, how Schedule C Part III handles inventory, what Schedule SE costs you, when quarterly estimated payments are due, and why sales tax is a completely separate filing your tax software will never touch.

A category-by-category reference to ecommerce business tax deductions, mapped to actual Schedule C line numbers, with verified 2026 IRS figures for mileage, section 179, the 1099-NEC threshold and retirement limits, plus what gets disallowed and why.

e-file.com pricing broken down for self-employed store owners: Free Federal Basic at $0, Deluxe Plus at $29.99, Premium Plus at $49.99, and $32.99 per state at every tier. Why business income forces you to the top plan, where the free tier stops being free, how it compares to FreeTaxUSA, Cash App Taxes, TurboTax and H&R Block, and when IRS Free File means you should not pay at all.

Most ecommerce sellers I talk to are still doing bookkeeping the same way they did on day one: a shoebox of receipts, a spreadsheet that gets updated once a quarter if they are lucky, and a scramble every April. AI-powered bookkeeping tools have made it possible to close your books daily instead of yearly, but […]

Bookkeeping was the thing I put off longest when I started my first high-ticket dropshipping store, and it cost me real money in missed deductions and margin I did not realize I was losing. AI has changed what is possible here faster than almost any other back-office category, so I rebuilt this list from scratch […]

Of the five alternatives I covered in my Median alternatives guide, Finaloop is the one I get asked about most, because it is the only one built specifically for ecommerce sellers from the ground up. If you run a high-ticket dropshipping store and are trying to decide between Median’s daily AI bookkeeping and Finaloop’s ecommerce-native […]

I already covered what I like and what concerns me about Median in my full review, and the short version is that Median’s daily AI bookkeeping and Claude integration are genuinely ahead of the category, but it was not built with ecommerce sellers as the primary customer. If inventory accounting, Shopify-native reporting, or a more […]