If you are trying to tackle eCommerce accounting, you know how critical it is to be able to reconcile marketplace sales and expenses to the payouts that hit your bank account. Well, just like we previously did for eBay, we are pleased to announce the ability to drill into any Amazon payout to see the precise data that makes up that payout amount.
When you click into your Amazon account from your Seller Ledger dashboard and review your transactions, you have likely seen your payouts listed with an “>>expand” link next to them:
When you click expand, you’ll see some important additional information. Not only do we show the bank account details that the transfer was made to, but we show the summary totals by category.
And if that’s not enough, we also provide a button to be able to drill down and see EXACTLY which transactions make up that payout.
And as a reminder, if you link Seller Ledger to the bank account where those payouts get deposited, we will automatically match the payouts from your Amazon account to the deposit in that bank account.
This means you can look at any Amazon payout deposit and drill all the way back down to see the transactions that are included.
As we did earlier this summary for eBay, we’ve now rolled out a new channel summary page for Amazon as well. While Seller Ledger has been able to import all of your Amazon sales, refunds and fees for a while, now it’s even easier to make sense of all of that detailed data.
Now, when you click into your Amazon account from your Seller Ledger dashboard, you’ll see a screen like the following:
Drill down on any payout to see the totals for each payout including every single transaction that’s included in that payout.
Amazon has a large number of transaction types, especially their fees. While Seller Ledger focuses primarily on rolling up all of those amount to your end of year tax form, this new view should help you get a better sense of all of Amazon financial data.
While most of the major eCommerce marketplaces, like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Etsy have robust APIs that make it possible for us to automatically import and categories their transactions, a lot of newer and smaller marketplaces haven’t made that investment.
For some of the more popular ones, like Whatnot, Poshmark, Mercari and Depop, we’ve built a custom import tool for the transactions that they allow you to export. And we continue to evaluate other marketplaces.
But, in the meantime, we’ve recently rolled out the ability to track sales from any marketplace. You can now import order history from any online platform, so long as you can modify their transaction files to match our format. Here’s how it work:
Step 1: Download your transaction history in CSV format
Log into your marketplace and find the place to access your order/transaction history. The more detailed the report, the better. Then, download it in a CSV (comma-separated) format – a very common format for exporting data.
To upload a file with order and refund details, Seller Ledger expects the following fields:
Required:
Order Date
Order ID
Customer Name
Product Name
Quantity
Unit Price
Ship To State
Ship To Zip
Ship To Country
Optional:
SKU
Shipping
Tax
Ship To Address
Ship To City
In fact, it may be easier to simply use our sample format file, which we provide here.
Step 4: Upload the new file to Seller Ledger
Click into your newly created marketplace account from the dashboard and click the “Upload history” tab.
You’ll want to choose the “Upload orders” option on the left. Click the “Choose File” button, select the reformatted file you just created, and click Save. Seller Ledger will begin importing your order history, complete with any product, fee and refund details that are provided.
While we pride ourselves on providing the most automated accounting solution for eCommerce sellers, there will always be circumstances where a seller conducts business in person, or on a platform what doesn’t offer much in the way of connectivity.
For those cases, we’ve rolled out improved order history tracking for off-site and cash sales.
Step 1: Create an account to track those off-site or cash sales
We just rolled out the ability to create/add a new type of asset account that you can use to track these sales. From your dashboard, click the “Add Channels, Banks and Accounts” button and, if you scroll to the bottom of the next screen, you’ll see the following option:
This can be a “Cash” account, or an account to track sales from other online marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace, TCGplayer, StockX and more. Just name your account and you’re off to the races.
Step 2: Add your order details
Click into your newly created account from your Dashboard, and you’ll see a new button called “Add order” in the upper right:
Clicking on that button will bring up a much more detailed transactions screen that not only lets you enter the regular information like date, customer, and amount, but will also let you record the item(s) that you sold:
If you scroll down, you will also see that we allow you to enter additional information about each order, including:
Any shipping you may have collected from the buyer
Any sales tax you may have collected (or had collected for you)
Any fees that may have been incurred (for example, by a non-connected marketplace that this order sold through
Any shipping labels or other shipping costs you had to pay
If a part of this order was donated to charity
As a reminder, the more details you can record that are tied to an order, the better able Seller Ledger is to tell you the EXACT net profit you make on every sale.
And as a reminder, you can always us the regular “Add transaction” button to record things like payouts (remember – they are transfers,) non-order fees, etc.
Want more step-by-step guidance?
If you’re having trouble figuring out how to enter data from certain non-connected marketplaces, just email us a copy of one or more of their reports (or screens) to [email protected] and we’d be happy to help.
Give it a try
Whether it’s cash-sales or other non-connected platforms, you can now get a complete view of your eCommerce business finances. Seller Ledger offers everyone a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required. Sign up and see for yourself how easy it is to get your finances in order.
Recently, we wrote about how folks who source on eBay can track their purchases in Seller Ledger. Well, we’ve also heard that more and more resellers are sourcing from Whatnot, a fast-growing live-streaming sales platform. We already make it possible to import your Whatnot sales into Seller Ledger, but today, we’ll show you how to create inventory from your purchase history.
Step 1: Get your Whatnot purchase history in the right format
First, you’re going to want to download your Whatnot orders report for a given period of time. It will come in a CSV file format that, then you open it in a spreadsheet, will look something like this:
The goods news is, because it’s already in a CSV file format, you only need to make a few changes and it will upload to Seller Ledger just fine.
Step 2: Remove and rename columns
The vast majority of the columns in this file won’t be needed for uploading inventory. You can simply delete the following columns, which are not supported by our inventory upload feature
order id
order numeric id
buyer
seller
product description
product category
processed date
order status
order style
order currency
sold price
subtotal
shipping price
taxes
taxes currency
credits applied
Inbound cost of goods sold
Note: because the “total amount” column amount includes the inbound “shipping price” and “taxes” amounts, that “total amount” will be properly divided among the quantity of the items and be included in the item costs.
Keep the “product name” column header as is, as well as the header for “quantity.” But rename “total amount” column header to “total cost” to match the column headers we require.
Step 3: Create unique SKUs for each product
The most important step now is to add a new column, titled “sku” and to create unique SKUs for each item in this file. Then, when you list them on various platforms to sell (and include the corresponding SKU value,) Seller Ledger can tie the sale back to the original cost, reduce your inventory and properly calculate cost of goods sold.
Step 4: Upload your inventory to Seller Ledger
Lastly, to load this cost information into Seller Ledger, just go to the Inventory tab and click the “Add Inventory” button. Record the date that you are uploading this information, “Whatnot” as “Purchased from” and enter the total amount of all of the items (which you can add up in the spreadsheet.) Then click the button near the bottom of the screen that says “Upload inventory”, choose the file, and click save. Within a few minutes, it should show as a single large purchase of items with all of the cost details broken down.
That’s it. Happy sourcing on Whatnot. May your profit be ever increasing.
In an effort to help sellers avoid stock outs, we just released a new version of the Inventory -> Stock page.
We’ve added a couple of new features to help avoid stocks by making it easier to track out-of-stock inventory. They will also help with re-ordering and inventory analysis.
For one, you can now filter by stock levels, including items that are out of stock, and those that are at a low stock level (below 10 units.)
Plus, you can now sort your inventory by any of the columns.
We’ve been getting more and more requests from our resellers asking for ways to better automate inventory management, in this case then they source from eBay. It is possible to track eBay inventory purchases as Inventory, but it takes a little bit of adjusting. Here are the key steps:
Step 1: Get your eBay purchase history in the right format
First of all, you’ll need to request your purchase history from eBay, which should get you a list that looks like this:
Next, you will need to copy and paste the table information from this page into a spreadsheet and save it as a CSV formatted file. Fortunately, because the data is laid out in a table format, copying and pasting should work quite well. Having your data in this format will allow you to easily upload the details to Seller Ledger.
Also, make sure to to delete any items that were purchased for personal use.
Note: because the total cost column amount includes the Transaction Shipping Fee amount, that amount will be properly divided among the quantity of the items and be included in the item costs.
Rename the Listing Title column to “product name” and the Total Price column to “total cost” to match the column headers we require.
Step 3: Create unique SKUs for each product
The most important step now is to add a new column, titled “sku” and to create unique SKUs for each item in this file. Then, when you list them on eBay, record them in the Custom label (SKU) field. That will ensure that we can tie the sale back to the item cost.
Step 4: Upload your inventory to Seller Ledger
Lastly, to load this cost information into Seller Ledger, just go to the Inventory tab and click the “Add Inventory” button. Record the date that you are uploading this information, “eBay” as “Purchased from” and enter the total amount of all of the items (which you can add up in the spreadsheet.) Then click the button near the bottom of the screen that says “Upload inventory”, choose the file, and click save. Within a few minutes, it should show as a single large purchase of items with all of the cost details broken down.
That’s it! Hopefully that saves a bunch of time for those of you sourcing inventory from eBay.
One of the first things new customers do when linking online marketplaces to Seller Ledger is to compare the numbers in our program to what they see on their marketplace. This can be especially challenging with platforms like eBay, because they provide different totals depending on where you look in their website. Want a great example? Check out this deep dive guide on how eBay reports their 1099-K totals and how it compares to other totals in various places on eBay.
Fortunately, we’ve taken the extra time and effort to make this even easier. Now, as soon as your eBay account gets connected, you can click into it to see a summary report like this:
We have modeled this page after the Performance report in eBay’s Seller Hub. You can change the date range, see you recent sales and selling costs within that date range, and see your payout history. You can even click into each payout to see every transaction that makes up that payout, as we recently announced.We will be rolling out similar pages tailored to each of our other channels in the future, so please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvements at [email protected].
It is with no small sense of excitement that we are announcing the initial rollout of a long-awaited feature: the ability to view your NET profit per order. What is net profit per order? It’s how much money you make after all order-level costs have been factored in, including inventory cost, fees and shipping. Many customers think of it as their “ROI” or return on investment for each item they sell.
This has been a goal going back to the original days of Outright, which became GoDaddy Bookkeeping, which was eventually shut down – all without ever having delivered on one of the most powerful features available in eCommerce: the ability to answer the question – how much money did I actually make on that sale?
But what about the other costs associated with an order, like fees and shipping costs?
That’s where our new update comes in. With many platforms, we receive enough information about order-related fees to automatically link those additional expenses.
eBay profit per order
To start, we have rolled this functionality out for eBay sellers. In addition to Final Value fees, we can now also get your shipping label expenses and any Ad fees for that order. Assuming you have also recorded your inventory costs and use the Custom label (SKU) field when listing, Seller Ledger can now give you the following:
Just click into your eBay account, and, next to any order, click “>>expand” to see this new breakdown.
What if I buy shipping elsewhere?
Fear not, we also have the ability for you to link purchases of shipping labels/postage from other sources (e.g. Shipstation, Pirate Ship, USPS, FedEx, wherever.) In those case, you’ll see a line that looks like this:
Click that button to choose from an existing purchase from one of your connected bank/credit card accounts, or to manually enter the shipping cost:
A few caveats
As with any software solution, we can only provide information that is as good as the data we receive. If you don’t track your inventory costs at the item level, we cannot, of course, tell you your net profit.
In addition, for sellers on other marketplaces/platforms, you may notice pieces of this functionality when you click on >>expand in those accounts, but not as complete. Fear not, it’s on our list to expand to other direct connections such as Amazon, Shopify, Etsy and Walmart.
Help us continue to journey
We have made great strides in providing you the information you need to see how much money you are making on each eCommerce sale. But as you can see, there’s still more work to do. We will continue to automate more matching of information that is currently available. But to achieve more automation, we could use your help.
For those marketplaces that don’t provide public APIs of their financial data (Poshmark, Mercari, Whatnot, Depop,) we invite you to email them and make that request. If enough people do so, perhaps they will prioritize such an effort. And if they do, rest assured, Seller Ledger will be here to add that next level of automation and insight.
Are you using a less automated way to manage your eCommerce finances?
Whether it’s manual spreadsheets or other accounting platforms that don’t provide enough detail, it’s never too late to improve your back office processes. We let our product speak for itself, which is why we offer everyone a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required. Sign up and connect multiple platforms in minutes.
Some good news for small eCommerce sellers! Congress, in the new One Big Beautiful Act, has restored the original 1099-K reporting threshold to $20,000 and 200 transactions in a year.
If you’re an eCommerce business seller, it was always necessary to file a tax return to report your profits, regardless of what 1099-Ks you received. However, lowering the reporting threshold to $600 was starting to catch a LOT of individuals simply selling their personal items, which was a big unintended consequence of the original idea.
