Why won't my Poshmark or Mercari CSV file import?

We've noticed a few potential "gotchas" where customers have had trouble uploading and importing their sales history files from Poshmark and Mercari. CSV, as a format, is very flexible, but not at all forgiving when it comes to formatting data. So, we wanted to share a few examples of things we've seen so you can double-check your files before uploading to Seller Ledgers

Poshmark

Do not delete the rows above the column headers

It is tempting to delete the first 12 or so rows in your Poshmark sales history. However, we built our Poshmark import to look past those rows, so trying to "edit" the file in this way can cause trouble.

Mercari

Do NOT open your Mercari file in a spreadsheet, especially Excel

The most common error we see if when customers writing in saying their file won't upload and the message says the Date format is wrong. And the majority of the time, it's because that file was opened in a spreadsheet and then saved.

Even if you make no changes to the file, it will still not upload to Seller Ledger correctly because the spreadsheets, when they open CSV files, automatically change some of the formatting. Mercari wraps their values in double quotes, which spreadsheets remove. They also format their dates as "yyyy-mm-dd", which is how how we've built our software to interpret them. But spreadsheets like Excel will often change that to "dd/mm/yy".

So, if your first attempt doesn't work, make sure you are downloading the original file from Mercari to your computer, and uploading that unedited version.

Check for rows where the number of values does not match the number of columns

We have seen a couple of unedited Mercari files fail because one of the columns is missing a "null" or "empty" value, which is usually represented by two double quotes right next to each other (""). Specifically, we have seen files where one of the date columns was missing a double quote. The easiest way to see this is to open your Mercari file in a spreadsheet and scan down the key columns like "Item Title" and make sure everything lines up. You can quickly tell when there might be a missing empty value. The solution is to add two empty quotes, followed by a comma.

Quotes in the Item Description can throw off the columns

If you see an error for a specific line in your file, you may want to check for double quotes (") somewhere in the Item Title. We have seen this cause trouble for users selling items where they use double quotes to mean "inches" - for example a 1/4" socket wrench. To fix this, we suggest replacing the double quotes with the word "inch".