eBay Sales Tracking
What does it mean to track your eBay sales, how should you go about it, and why should you bother to do this?
There are many reasons tracking your eBay sales is valuable. It can help you to understand how much money you are making on your eBay sales. You can better understand all the costs involved, and it will help you to get organized when you have to pay taxes on profits from your eBay sales. Most importantly, it will help you understand whether or not this eBay business is something you should continue to invest your time in and grow.
What to Track for eBay Sales
What are the key things to track for your eBay sales? Youʻll find many of the basic elements in your reports in eBay’s Seller Hub. However, there are a few things you should be tracking and double-checking outside of those standard eBay reports as well. This image shows an overview of the key things to track, and we’ll discuss each of these in more detail.

Sales Price
Often referred to as Revenue, this is the value of your sales that have completed on the eBay platform. To find these numbers on eBay, login to your eBay account. Go to the Seller Hub and click the Performance tab at the top. Select Sales from the left-hand menu and you will see a summary of your recent Sales. You can modify the dates for the report to select the time-period you would like to review.
Included in your Sales Price is any Shipping amount youʻve charged to the buyer as well. This counts as part of your revenue, because itʻs possible you could be making a profit on Shipping charges. If youʻre charging the customer more than your actual costs for shipping, thatʻs profit.
Item Cost
This is how much you paid to acquire the items you have sold. eBay recently released a new feature where you can include “Your Cost” in eBayʻs Seller Hub when listing an item, though many customers donʻt want to share this information with eBay (so that eBay doesnʻt have a full view into their profits.) This value is important to track however, so that you know how much profit you made on your sales. Unless you’ve been selling personal items at a loss, you will need to pay taxes on the profits from your eBay sales at the end of each year.
eBay Fees
These are the fees that eBay charges as a commission on the sale. While they may seem expensive, eBay also delivers a lot of value for these fees. Think of the effort you would have to go to in order to advertise each item for sale on your own. Leveraging eBay’s existing audience that is already searching for what you have to sell takes much less effort. If you want to read more on this topic, check out this blog post about all you get for your eBay fees.
Advertising Fees
In addition to the standard fees that eBay charges, you may have paid additional fees to advertise your listingsand generate increased visibility for them. These fees will also play an important role in your total costs and your profitability. Youʻll subtract both standard eBay fees and eBay Advertising fees from your Sales to calculate your Profit.
Taxes & Government Fees
eBay both collects and remits Sales Tax for your items. Because they are collecting and remitting the same amount for each of your sales, this will not impact your profitability.
Shipping & Handling Costs
You will track shipping costs differently depending on whether you are purchasing your shipping labels through eBay or outside of eBay. If you are purchasing shipping outside of eBay, you may leverage a company like Pirate Ship or Ship Station to do this. In either case, this is an important part of your cost structure to track. If you purchase a shipping label through eBay, the cost of the shipping label will be subtracted from the eBay payout before you receive it. You can view a report in eBay’s Seller Hub to see your total “Shipping Labels”costs for the year. If you purchase your shipping outside of eBay this cost will need to be tracked separately.
The actual postage is one part of your Shipping Costs, but you may have others as well. Purchases of shipping supplies such as boxes, packing tape and bubble wrap are important to document. In addition, if you are driving your packages somewhere be shipped, you may qualify to deduct the mileage for these trips.
Returns and Refunds
When a customer returns an item and you issue a refund back to that customer, it’s important that your eBay Sales Tracking records this transaction as well. Depending on which reports you review on eBay, Returns and Refunds may or may not be included. When you calculate your profit at the end of a year for tax purposes, make sure to subtract out any returns/refunds from your total sales. This is something that can be easily missed (even on the 1099-k forms eBay issues to you). You don’t want to overpay your taxes as a result!
Additional Expenses
As an eBay seller, you will likely have additional expenses that are part of running your eBay business. This might include materials like shelving, bins or garment racks for storage, photography equipment and lighting, and more. We discussed driving packages to the post office above, but you might have other driving expenses as well such as going to a store to source additional inventory. The IRS allows you to deduct mileage expenses for these trips. You may also qualify for the home office deduction if you are using a portion of your home for your eBay business. Track all of these expenses so that you can subtract them from your total sales to pay taxes on the smaller amount that is your true profit.
What are the Best eBay Sales Trackers?
Now that you know all the things you need to track, what is the best way to do this? Weʻll talk through the pros and cons of some different methods below.
eBay Seller Hub Reports
The first place to find basic reports about your eBay Sales is eBay itself and the Performance reports provided in eBayʻs Seller Hub. Youʻll need to be logged into eBay to view these. As we discussed previously however, this is not enough to provide visibility to your full sales and expenses.
Spreadsheets
Many sellers track sales and expenses manually in an Excel spreadsheet when they are first starting out. On the plus side, you can design a spreadsheet to track things exactly as youʻd like to see them. On the minus side, if youʻre selling more than a small volume of goods, this becomes cumbersome very quickly however. Itʻs easy to make mistakes and miss things. To see an example of an eBay Tracking spreadsheet, check out this one from Mark Tew, NotYourDadsCPA, which is available as a free download.
Automated Accounting Software
Automated accounting software can automatically pull in all your data from eBay, including your Sales, Shipping Costs, Fees, Returns and Refunds. While you will have to pay for this software, the time you will save is well worth it if youʻre selling more than a small number of items. If youʻre interested to learn more about how that works, you can read about it here. Companies such as Seller Ledger , Quickbooks and Xero can automate this process for you. This Bookkeeping Guide for eBay Sellers includes a comprehensive review of these solutions with pros and cons of each company.
Why use an eBay Sales Tracker?
Why go to all this effort when eBay has basic reports? If you’re like most eBay sellers, doing the work to review your numbers is not the fun part of running your eBay business. You’d rather be sourcing new items and selling! But it really is worth it to know your numbers, and here are some key reasons to go beyond the basic reports eBay provides.
1. Not all of your costs are captured in eBayʻs reports
As we outlined above, many costs are not captured by eBayʻs reports. The cost of your inventory, your shipping & handling costs (including shipping materials), your mileage expenses and more cannot always be found in an eBay report.
2. Avoid over-paying your taxes
Without capturing ALL of your costs, you are likely to overpay your taxes at the end of the year. Even eBayʻs 1099-k reports donʻt always include all the returns are refunds that have been issued, so they may overstate your sales. Without your full set of costs, they will overstate the amount of profit you need to pay taxes on. This is real money weʻre talking about! Donʻt pay more than you need to!
3. Understand your Net Profit per Order
Once you are tracking all of your income and expenses, you can get an understanding of your Net Profit per Order. This allows you to see which of your items are making you the most money. Once you know that, you know what you want to source more of and what you want to stop selling because youʻre losing money on it. This is how you can improve the profitability of your eBay business over time.
4. Scale your eBay Business with Confidence
Once you truly undertsand how much money you are making, you can have the confidence to go out there and grow your business! Aquire the right inventory and sell more so that your eBay Sales can be more than just a small side hustle and turn into a real source of income for you.
We hope youʻve found this article helpful. Find more articles about tracking your eBay business on the Seller Ledger blog, or try Seller Ledgerʻs 30 day free trial to automate your eBay Sales Tracking today.













