eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Obtain Sales Records

Extract detailed accounting data from My eBay, or do it automatically with eBay’s Selling Manager.

Sellers pay the bills at eBay. Fees are assessed for the creation of listings [Hack #43] and any upgrades you choose [Hack #46] , and eBay gets a percentage of the final value of each successfully completed auction.

You can check your account by going to My eBay → My Account → View Invoice → View Selected Invoice. The fees here are broken down individually and cross-referenced by item number. To see exactly how much a particular auction cost you, just search for the item number, add up the corresponding amounts shown in the Debit column, and subtract any corresponding entries in the Credit column.

Quick and Dirty Spreadsheet Import

Unfortunately, eBay’s invoice isn’t too flexible. To make the data more useful, you can import it into a spreadsheet to organize the data. (This will also afford you the ability to keep old invoices permanently; eBay stores them for only 18 months.) Since eBay doesn’t have a formal Export feature, you’ll have to do the conversion manually. In your browser, go to File → Save As in your browser, and save as an HTML file.

Tip

If you want to remove the images and search box from the page, open the HTML file in a text editor and do a few search-and-replace operations before importing it into Excel. Replace every occurrence of <img with <ximg, and every occurrence of <input with <xinput. Save the file when you’re done.

Open the page in a web-capable ...