Bookkeeping

A self-employed store owner pays $174.98 at TaxAct for a federal Schedule C return plus one state, and $82.98 at e-file.com. Here are the 2026 prices verified on both vendors’ own pages, what TaxAct’s $100,000 Accuracy Guarantee actually covers and excludes, what Xpert Assist really costs, and the IRS Free File rules that may make both irrelevant.

Ranked for how a store owner actually files: inventory and cost of goods sold, 1099-K gross versus net reconciliation, multi-state nexus, home office, and quarterly estimates. Seven products with 2026 prices verified against vendor pages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 […]