eBay is making a change to billing cycles, moving everyone to the 1st of the month. eBay used to bill some sellers on the 1st of the month and others on the 15th of the month, but a year ago, after eBay became a payments intermediary for a greater number of its users, it began collecting seller fees directly from their earnings.
But because of the legacy system, eBay continued to send monthly statements for some users on the 15th. That’s changing this year.
This week, eBay informed sellers that beginning in March, it would generate all financial statements on the 1st of the month. (Financial statements include a summary of selling activity and a detailed view of transactions, including information on claims, refunds, payment disputes, payouts.)
In a help page on its website, eBay explained:
“Beginning 1 March, 2022, eBay will generate all financial statements on the 1st of the month, which will cover activity from the 1st to the last day of the calendar month. We’ll no longer be supporting the mid-month cycle for invoices and financial statements. For more information, please read our most frequently asked questions and answers on billing cycles below.”
eBay explained how the rollout would affect sellers currently on a mid-month cycle:
At the beginning of April, you’ll receive a tax invoice and financial statement covering the 16-day transition period spanning the end of the previous cycle and the beginning of the next cycle (March 16 – March 31). You’ll receive the next 30 day tax invoice and financial statement at the beginning of the next month (May 01, 2022).
For example:
- You receive your tax invoice and financial statement on or around March 16 for sales from February 16 – March 15
- You would receive another tax Invoice and financial statement on or around April 1 with sales from March 16 – March 31
- Going forward, you’ll receive your tax invoice and financial statement at the start of each month (May 1, June 1, etc.) detailing your activity in the prior month
eBay said the move was mandatory and encouraged sellers to update their processes in preparation for the change, though we haven’t seen any early resistance to the change. On the contrary, sellers appear to welcome the change.
One seller said mid-monthly statements had made it difficult to reconcile monthly activity, especially the period between mid-December to mid-January, which played havoc with annual reports since they spanned years.
Another seller agreed, writing in part, “This is really good news for some sellers that were getting this report on a Fiscal Period. Most sellers do their accounting by month and for those of use that could not get this report for a calendar month it rendered the report pretty useless.”
Note that it’s unclear if the recent problem some sellers reported about getting statements late had anything to do with the forthcoming change in billing cycles.
It’s about time. Who would have ever thought it was a good ides to break it in the middle of the month. this will make it much better for tax years.
Now if ebay can get their monthly and yearly statements straighten out and not change day to day when you run a report.
I wish that eBay would go back and reissue monthly statements for this year. Otherwise, some of the benefit is lost until the beginning of 2023. I wish that eBay would provide simple roll up summaries of sales, refunds, final-value fees, eBay postage, insertion fees, monthly fees, other fees and holds for each payout, the month, quarter and year with sales summary and sales by state. Detailed listings contain data, but rollup summaries start to provide information.