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The Best Way to Merge eBay and Faire Data for Handoff to Your Accountant
If you're doing handoff to your accountant by hand right now, here's the fastest path from "two exports" to "one usable sheet," and why the manual version keeps breaking.
Step by step
- Decide your target columns once. Most people settle on Date, Channel, Order ID, and Total — set that up in CSV Experts and you won't redo it.
- Import the eBay file first. The first time you see this file shape, you map each of its columns to your target list.
- Import the Faire file the same way. Its columns get mapped once too — after that, every future file with this shape merges with no extra clicks.
- Check the merged totals. Dates and numbers are normalized automatically, so a European "24,00" and a US "24.00" both land as the same value.
- Export. CSV or Excel, ready for handoff to your accountant.
What actually goes wrong if you do this by hand
eBay gives you Sale Date shown in the seller's local time, while Faire gives you an order date shown alongside a separate ship date for wholesale orders — line those up manually across a few hundred rows and it's easy to miscount a week. On top of that, eBay's export the seller hub export format changed more than once, so column names can differ depending on when the report was generated, and Faire's quantities are per case/pack rather than per unit, which throws off totals if merged as if it were a retail export. Individually those are minor quirks; combined into one spreadsheet by hand, they're where most reconciliation errors for handoff to your accountant actually come from.
Why it matters for handoff to your accountant
Handing raw multi-platform exports to an accountant usually means paying them to do the cleanup you could do yourself in a few minutes.
Just want the quick column-difference reference instead? See the short version.