Should eBay Announce Changes To Financial Reports?
A seller in the eBay community has some pretty strong thoughts about eBay's lack of notice to sellers about changes to financial reports - calling it, in a word, "embarrassing."
Seriously eBay. Change Control is the most BASIC part of the development process.
Every couple of months someone makes a change to a report or a download. No one bothers to tell the Users of the actual report. This is not a glitch, it is not something that was changed on the fly. Someone approved this change and then someone else changed the actual code. No one bothered to tell the end User.
This month you changed the Sales Record Number on the Orders Paid and Shipped Download report from a sequential numeric to the the actual Order Number that is 14 characters and contains special characters, and did not bother to tell anyone.
I have no issues with report changes, I am happy to adjust to them. I have issues where you fundamentally change or add a field to a report or a download with no notice or not even bothering to share what changed.
Every time this happens,anyone that has an automated process, or uses these reports has to first try to figure out what changed, and then make adjustments to the various programs that use the reports. I hate to think about how this affects people that use the big accounting programs.
This is not a minor thing. Someone went in an made a change to a financial report. That someone should be following up with someone else so that notice is given to, you know the people that actually USE the reports.
You have all of these places from the Announcements section in the Seller hub to this very forum to notify users. Why are they not being utilized to notify the Users of changes like this?
I would be mortified if I were a company the size of eBay making changes to financial reports without bothering to tell anyone.
Another seller chimed in with some interesting insight into the corporate view of communications in general.
eBay badly struggles in the communications end - it's not just providing a change log, it's pretty much everything. Unfortunately, they're not the only one - Etsy is about as bad.
Having been in tech writing and editing much of my career, I suspect why - communications (as opposed to marcom) is perceived as revenue-negative overhead and no one wants to pay for it, yet there is almost zero understanding of why it's essential (and actually NOT overhead).
eBay's financial reporting (or lack thereof) for Managed Payments has been a sore subject for sellers since the program first started rolling out in 2018.
One example of many - is this seller who has been trying to get help with foreign currency reporting issues for months.
Liz Morton
Yesterday, eBay announced a new integration with Quickbooks and appears to be heavily partnered with Intuit providing educational and promotional content as well as a discount for new subscribers.
Liz Morton
While that may be good news for sellers who use Quickbooks, it raises some concern about how that will influence eBay going forward in regard to support for other accounting programs or improvements to downloadable financial reports for sellers.
What do you think about eBay's financial reports? Do they give you all the information you need to handle your business bookkeeping? Let us know in the comments below!
