Is it eBay or is it PayPal. Tracking my purchases, where do refunds go.

[mindmyownbusiness]

I've just realized how much more complicated making and tracking purchases on eBay has become. How can I change the account set ups to make it better? Specific questions at the end.

It the past, when I made a purchase on eBay and paid with paypal, the seller name, member id, item title, and price, shipping, and tax detail were available in PayPal activity view and would appear in activity downloads.  I could easily categorize all purchases by my own budget category.

Now, when I make a purchase on eBay and pay with paypal, the only thing shown in paypal activity view is an eBay order number, no information on what was bought or price detail.

Worse still, in the PayPal activity download, an eBay purchase is described only as "shopping cart item", no information regarding item or order number. Date is too  ambiguous to identify the order or item.

Also, I have been using PayPal to pay for eBay purchases, in order to prevent eBay from getting anymore information about my bank accounts. But it doesn't work that way.  PayPal and eBay are completely transparent to one another, even though they are "different companies."  There is no buffer at all:

• eBay sees the funding source used behind the for the "PayPal" payment and acts it as if is authorized to work directly with that funding source, such as my personal banking account. 
• On a refund of a transaction in which part was paid by balance and part was paid by transfer from my bank, eBay apportioned the refund directly to my bank.
• Where I made two purchases on the same day, eBay and PayPal treated it as one transaction, not two. Impossibly confusing my activity statements from PayPal and my Bank. Co-mingling of transactions  makes budget tracking impossible.

Now eBay has my business accounts because I'm a seller on managed payments, and my person account from which I buy. Under the eBay user agreement, eBay can keep all financial information it comes across while I'm buying and selling  and go into any of those accounts to recover any funds it thinks it is owed for any purpose at any time. 

Do I have to close all of my current accounts (ones I've had for 45 years!) in order to disentangle business selling and person buying on eBay? Is there any credit card, debit card, or payment processor that I can use when buying on eBay that is NOT connected to eBay and will truly buffer my personal financial resources from eBay knowledge? How do I obtain a flat file of eBay purchases that show what was purchased that I can generate at any time?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

[downunder-61]

All purchaase history will be on your eBay

Refunds go back to your payment source

[hockeydb.com]

This is an important, but often ignored issue.

I use Quickbooks Online to track my purchases, because they are business expenses. I pay using PayPal.

Before managed payments, it worked almost perfectly - I would get transactions each day from PayPal, and those transactions would have line items for each item purchased in an order, along with a line for postage, and one for sales tax paid. I only had to categorize each line item into the proper expense bucket.

With managed payments, as you note, the transaction just comes through with a description that says "purchase amount". It includes all items in the order PLUS postage AND sales tax all lumped together. There is no description, no seller, and the only hint as to what the transaction is for comes from a memo line that has the Order Number.

I have to save all my eBay purchase emails, and then do a text search on them to find the details of the order. Lately, eBay has added the order number to the Purchase History screen, but I can't find a way to actually plug the order number into eBay and search for it, nor can I find a way to download all my purchases with detailed information.

I reached out to Quickbooks, and they said "sorry, not our issue, talk to PayPal, our software is working just fine".

I reached out to PayPal, they said "sorry, not our issue, talk to eBay, our software is working just fine".

I reached out to eBay and no one answers.

The only benefit that "managed payments" seems to have is for eBay, because it shields the buyer from the seller completely. I suppose they probably closed some commission leakage from people who would email a seller they previously bought from and say "hey, I see you have some other items that I want, how about I just pay you via PayPal"? But in return, they have made accounting virtually unusable for those who need to track this stuff.