Depósito del Archivo de la Fundación Sierra-Pambley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If you’re like me, no matter how organized you are, you always hit that point when you know you sold an item but can’t remember when you sold it or what it sold for. Even if you have the world’s best records, combing through years and years of eBay transactions to find a specific one is a huge pain.
Well, here’s a solution so simple you’ll kick yourself that you didn’t think of it years ago. We’re going to use a free Google Drive account to create an infinitely searchable archive of all our past eBay transactions so we’ll always be able to find any past transaction quickly. It’s easy. Ready?
- Log into your Google Drive account. (If you already have a Google account such as Google+, Gmail or YouTube, you already have a Google Drive account, you just need to activate it.)
- Go to My eBay > My Account > Seller Account. On the right hand side of the screen is the option to view your monthly eBay invoices up through the last year and a half. Pick any invoice and select it.
- Once inside the invoice, there’s the option to Download it in the top right hand corner. You’ll get the option to download it as HTML or CSV. Choose CSV.
- Download all available invoice as CSV files and then upload them all to your Google Drive account. (You can let Google Drive convert them to Google Spreadsheets, it’ll save space.) You can even do this in bulk by just dropping and dragging them all into your account.
And you’re done. Now you can easily search the last year and a half of transactions using the powerful advanced features of Google search. Now, if you’re like me and you’ve been downloading your invoices for years, you can upload this entire back history now and increase your searchable archive for as far back as you have invoices. If you’ve never been in the habit of downloading invoices before, just remember to download them all at least once every 18 months and you’ll never miss one. (I have a calendar reminder set for myself so I don’t forget.)
Google Drive gives you near infinite space and letting it convert the files makes them take up even less room. Another great feature is that you can put them all in a single collection and then share that collection with whoever you want. For instance, our “eBay Invoices” collection is shared between everyone who works with our eBay account so we all have access to the archive whenever we need it. You won’t believe how often it comes in handy!
What other uses can you think of for this archive?
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Not bad at all. What would REALLY be awe inspiring is if we had a way to easily archive the individual auction pages. We often sell variations of the same item (color, size, new vs used). NOW have 80 characters of title space so we can include that all that info in the title whereas we couldn’t really before.
Not knowing exactly how that data comes in, I will tell you that Google Docs can do some powerful freaking stuff. I’ve been trying to create better records of my eBooks sales. I ended up creating this ridiculous series of multiple spreadsheets in Google that all pull data from each other so that I can add the date to each of the other spreadsheets as it comes in and then the one main one compiles all that info into graphs, etc.
I like to play with spreadsheets. 🙂
There seems to be a bug with the Google Docs Upload Button. Namely its not available on some browsers. Im using Chrome and there is not way to upload directly. In the meantime, you can go to https://docs.google.com/?action=updoc to upload files. This seems to be the good old fashioned way.
Just incase anyone else runs into this problem
Another “cheat” is to email all the files to yourself in Gmail and then open them in Google Docs that way. But you can also by pass the upload button entire and drop and drag in many newer browsers.