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The Best Way to Merge Shopify and Faire Data for Sales Tax Reporting
If you're doing sales tax reporting 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 Shopify 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 sales tax reporting.
What actually goes wrong if you do this by hand
Shopify gives you a Created At timestamp that includes a timezone offset, 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, Shopify's export exports one row per line item by default, so an order with 3 products becomes 3 rows unless you export the summary report instead, 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 sales tax reporting actually come from.
Why it matters for sales tax reporting
Sales tax reporting needs order totals broken out consistently by date and location, which rarely matches between two platforms' raw exports.
Just want the quick column-difference reference instead? See the short version.