Bad news for users of SumAll. The service emerged early on as the best alternative when GoDaddy Bookkeeping, formerly Outright, which was itself the recommended eBay replacement for eBay Accounting Assistant (this is getting so ridiculous, you guys) started charging for their formerly free service. But while I was expecting bad news from SumAll eventually in the form of also moving to a paid service, I wasn’t expecting anything THIS bad.

SumAll announced that they were launching a new site launch recently and amid all those promises of new features and improvements, it was easy to miss the bad news: They were ceasing all financial reporting entirely and deleting user’s historical data to become yet another social network only service with only a vague promise that they might restore these services in the future. If you’re currently using SumAll to import financial information of any kind, not only will that be disappearing completely “in the next week” according to the rep I spoke to on Twitter, you’ll also lose all your historical data so make sure to log in and download that data ASAP or you’ll be up out of luck.  (I am at least grateful that they waited until the end of the quarter to pull the plug so we’re all not totally screwed when we do sales tax in two weeks.)

Now, obviously, it’s their service to do whatever the heck they want with and if they want to be the 9 billion and first social media data company out there instead of something unique or useful, that’s their choice but this cheeses me off for two big reasons:

SumAll handled this very poorly. When you log into your account either through eBay or the main site and view your soon to be dead financial info, there should be OMG blinking warnings and pop-ups that you need to back-up your data or it will be gone and… there’s nothing. A single email about it that I’m sure lots of users missed. That’s not cool, guys. It’s one thing to take away the service, it’s another to do it on such short notice in a situation where users not immediately up to date will lose their data forever.

Does this come out of some kind of internal philosophy that a service you get for free doesn’t owe you anything and thus shouldn’t be trusted with important data? Is it because they’re used to dealing with lower stakes data such as how many retweets versus real financial info for a business so they don’t realize how important it is? Aren’t THEY a business? Shouldn’t they get it? How could I ever trust their company ever again now that I know how little they valued my data this time out? They gain nothing by being stealthy about this change but ill will and angry customers so it makes no sense to me.

Anyway, speaking of things that make no sense…

eBay should have a solution for this in-house. We shouldn’t have to be bounced from third party to third party in the quest for financial software that imports nicely from eBay. eBay should have an actual working solution that lets us sellers access our financial info easily without the pain of the often inaccurate and far from user friendly Sales Reports store owners get. Discontinuing Accounting Assistant was less of a middle finger to sellers when there was a free 3rd party alternative… now that eBay’s basically like, “You’re on your own, suckers!” it just makes them look worse and worse.

You say you care about sellers, eBay? Fine. Show me. Instead of forcing us to jump through a million hoops for your ever changing listing needs, how about you actually give us some tools that make selling easier and get the hell out of our way! Useful, readable financial reports would be a big one and a great place to start.