Trouble with your shipping cost information?

[Scott]

Here is the status of shipping cost information with the new eBay APIs.


1.)  Bulk Shipping (w/ multiple shipments) - The new APIs do not contain the item transaction information paired with the individual cost of each shipment.  It only includes the total and the transactions that make up the bulk shipment.  To account for this information we have included a separate line item in your sold item tab as we cannot accurately put them in the individual row of each sale. 
  * With the newest update (January 3rd, 2023) the user can choose to send these bulk costs to Expense tab, Sold item tab, or Ignore them completely. *

2.)  Paying for shipping with PayPal - The new API will NOT return shipping costs if the shipping is paid for out of your PayPal account.  You can adjust this at the bottom of the page where you pay for the label, choose the option to pay with ebay account balance.


3.)  Non-USPS shipments (Fedex, UPS, etc) - These shipments will return the shipping cost, but it will not return until after the label is scanned and used;  Ebay treats all non-USPS shipping vendors as 'pay on scan' and USPS as 'pay on print'.  If your non-USPS shipment is missing shipping information, you can reset the download duration to go back far enough to cover that sale, and re-download sales, and it will populate the missing shipping cost (assuming the label has been scanned and used).


4.)  All other shipments (including bulk shipment with single item) should return with no issues, so please let me know if you have any issues not mentioned in 1-3 above.


Additional Background -

We (and most developers that utilize the eBay APIs) used to gather the shipping cost information through the 'selling manager' API.  EBay deprecated the 'selling manager' API and now only provides the shipping cost information through their newer 'Finances' API which comes with the restrictions mentioned in 1-3 above.
We have been in contact with the eBay Developer Support team about these issues and they have internally created a 'feature request' ticket to address #1 (above).  They have provided feedback that #2 & #3 (above) are functioning as intended.

[achseh]

So, for those of us that missed this - do we manually add it to the overall spreadsheet (where the sale details are listed) or add it as an Expense?

[Scott]

If you are manually adding the shipping information you could add it to each sold item row, or into the expense tracking section, either way it will factor into the P&L reports.  If you want to see the specific profit per item you would want to do it on the sold item level.