Exporting marketplace orders to CSV for bookkeeping
For a tax return or a handover to an accountant, individual PDFs are the wrong unit. You want the whole period as one table — and no marketplace makes that easy.
Why there is no export button
Marketplaces optimise for buying, not for accounting. Order history is built to help you find a past purchase and re-order it, so it is paginated, lazy-loaded, and filtered by rolling time windows rather than by tax year. Amazon has offered a report export in some regions and account types; most marketplaces offer nothing at all.
The result is that a year of purchases is spread across dozens of pages, each holding a headline total and nothing else. The detail — shipping, tax, the actual supplier — only exists on the individual order pages behind them.
The columns a bookkeeper actually wants
Not "date and amount". A usable export has one row per line item, with the order-level figures repeated alongside, so it can be pivoted either way:
| Column | Why |
|---|---|
| Source | Which marketplace — the reconciliation against card lines differs per platform |
| Order ID and date | The join key back to the original page and the bank statement |
| Currency | The one charged. A mixed-currency sheet with no currency column is unusable |
| Seller | The merchant, not the marketplace |
| Item, qty, unit price, line total | So a category can be assigned per item, not per order |
| Order subtotal, shipping, tax, fees, discount, total | Each in its own column — a lump sum cannot be posted |
The encoding detail that ruins the file
This one catches nearly everybody. Product titles from international marketplaces are full of
non-ASCII characters — accents, Cyrillic, CJK, emoji. Excel on Windows does not assume UTF-8
when opening a .csv; it uses the system code page. So a perfectly valid file opens
with every non-English title turned into mojibake, and the damage is silent.
The fix is a byte-order mark: a UTF-8 CSV that starts with EF BB BF tells Excel
what it is looking at, and the titles survive. Any export tool that omits it will produce
files that look fine in a text editor and wrong in the application people actually use.
Separators, quoting, and the other quiet corruption
- Commas in titles. Product names contain commas constantly. Fields must be quoted, and quotes inside them doubled, or the columns shift halfway down the file.
- Line breaks in titles. Rarer but real, and they split one row into two.
- Leading zeros and long numbers. Order IDs like
0012345lose their zeros, and 16-digit IDs get rendered in scientific notation. If that matters, import the file rather than double-clicking it, and set the column type to text. - Decimal commas. A European locale writes 1.234,56. If your sheet expects 1234.56, every amount silently becomes something else.
A practical approach
Export as you go rather than at year end. Order history thins out over time — detail behind older orders becomes unavailable long before your retention obligation expires — and the reconciliation is far easier in monthly slices than in one annual push.
OrderVault exports the orders on the page you are looking at to CSV with the columns above, UTF-8 with a BOM so Excel opens it correctly, and proper quoting. It runs entirely in your browser — the file is written locally and your order data is never uploaded anywhere.