Tradebox Finance Manager imports Amazon sales that are contained within the Amazon Order Report. This needs to be downloaded into a local folder on the user's PC or network prior to importing the sales into Tradebox. Tradebox can request and download a report automatically on your behalf using Amazon Marketplace Web Services (MWS) credentials; this automatic report request always contains the last 7 days worth of sales information. Our guide to setting up and using MWS is available here.
If you need Amazon sales information from further back, you may be able to manually request reports covering up to the last 60 days' worth of orders.
Amazon Merchant orders
- Log into Amazon Seller Central
- Select Orders
- Select Order Reports
- In the Request Order Report section of the New Orders screen select the duration of the report (1, 2, 7, 15, 30 or 60 days)
- Tick the “Include Sales Channel Column” box
- Click ‘Request Order Report’
- Your request will appear in the ‘Check Report Status & Download’ section. Click the Refresh button to update its status.
- When the report is ready, download into the Amazon IN folder.
- Then click Download under the Operations header in Tradebox.
Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) orders
The Amazon FBA order report can be requested by the following steps.
- Log into Amazon Seller Central
- Select Reports
- Select Fulfillment by Amazon
- Select Amazon Fulfilled Shipments
- Choose the date range of the report. The report has a maximum date range of 30 days but does allow you to set 'from' and 'to' dates, which makes it possible to repeat these steps multiple times to generate several reports which in total span more than 30 days.
- Click ‘Request Download'
- Your request will appear in the ‘Check Report Status & Download’ section. Click the Refresh button to update its status.
- When the report is ready, download into the relevant Amazon IN folder for FBA orders.
- Then click Download under the Operations header in Tradebox.
To find your Amazon In folders
Each Amazon sales channel in Tradebox has its own Input and Output folder; order reports are read from the In folder and moved to the Out folder once they've been processed. This process still happens if you're using Amazon's MWS credentials to automatically request the reports, you just normally don't see it happening.
- In Tradebox go to the Sales Channels list (under the Information header on the left)
- Open the first Amazon sales channel by double-clicking
- In the middle of the screen, you can see the path to the Input folder. Click on the Open button to the right of that path.
- The Input folder should now be open in file explorer. Copy and paste the report you've requested into this folder.
- Close the Input folder. Save and Close the channel in Tradebox.
- Repeat from step 2 onwards for each Amazon sales channel in your Tradebox.
- Once you've put a copy of the relevant report in each Amazon sales channel, click Download under the Operations header on the left of Tradebox to download the orders.
Note - manually requesting reports can throw off the last report ID system that Amazon uses to track automated report requests. If, following a manual download of Amazon reports your automated order download stops working, follow these steps.
Known Issues March 2018 and July 2018
Updated: December 2018
In March 2018 users started reporting an issue with manually-requested Amazon reports for merchant (seller-fulfilled) sales. Where previously, the report previously gave all users an option to include the sales channel column, in some cases this option was no longer present. In others, the option was present but did not populate the file with a sales channel column. In either instance, Tradebox was unable to read the order file, as it relies on a column indicating which Amazon marketplace each sale was raised through.
In July 2018, users reported a similar issue with FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) sales reports. In this case, the body of the report was unchanged, but the header row contained different information and Tradebox was unable to recognise this.
In both cases, we raised the issue with Amazon technical support and received responses that we deem factually incorrect, in that they don't tie in with our observations from testing with several users' data.
At the time, we observed that using MWS credentials to request either merchant reports or FBA reports resulted in an unchanged report form that was consistent with what our program expects, and was able to process with no problems. At this time, we advised all users to set up MWS credentials and this continues to be our advice for day-to-day processing. The MWS mechanism only ever requests a 7 day order report.
There may be times in which you need to request a longer historic date range. Over recent months, we've not seen evidence of the changes to the report system for manually-requested reports. This suggest either the changes have been reverted, or they vary from user to user. If you need to request a 30- or 60-day order report, our best suggestion is to try it; Tradebox will reject the order file if it proves to be in an incorrect format and write an error message to the log. If this happens, contact Tradebox support for guidance.
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