Handling Data Issues with Mercari Sales Reports

In helping Mercari sellers get ready to file their taxes, we've come across an interesting scenario that feels worth publishing for other sellers.

Last fall, Seller Ledger announced support for importing Mercari sales reports as a way to greatly reduce data entry and improve both tax preparation and insight into one's Mercari business. This is done by building a custom import solution for the CSV file that Mercari makes available to all sellers. Anyone who has spent time trying to move information between different software solutions using the CSV (comma-separated) format knows that things can get a bit finicky. In the case of Mercari's sales report, we've seen a number of customers have issues with the use of double quotes (") in product descriptions. This is most often seen when used as shorthand for the word "inches" - e.g. a 20" x 20" pillow cover.

If you are trying to import your Mercari sales report into Seller Ledger and get an error that says...

File formatting error: Any value after quoted field isn't allowed after line xx

... the odds are that you have an issue with double quotes, most likely in the Item Title.

One of the easiest ways to diagnose this is to open your sales report in Excel or another spreadsheet and scan all of the rows. You can quickly spot offending rows because the columns will not line up neatly with all of the others. You are likely to discover that, in certain rows, the Item Title and Order Status values have been combined in the same column, rather than treated separated. There's a reason for this.

Not to get too technical, but Mercari uses double quotes around each value in their file, which is pretty standard. However, as mentioned above, there can be issues when one of the column values in the file contains a double quote itself. To help differentiate between double quotes that contain the whole value of a field, and the quotes inside, the convention is to put two of them in a row to let software know that

Let's take a look at an example. Let's say you sell a blue 20-inch by 20-inch linen pillow cover and listed it with the following description:

Blue pillow cover - 20" x 20"

In the CSV file, that field should be represented as follows:

"Blue pillow cover - 20"" x 20"""

The first and last double quotes are meant to indicate that everything inside is the real information you want. The two double quotes in a row are used to tell whichever software is reading the information that it should be read as a single double quote within the value, not as the beginning or end of a value.

It appears that Mercari, when they export sales report information, is not always consistent with the use of two double quotes inside a column value. For example, we have seen examples like the following (modified for privacy reasons:)

"Acme Store Blue pillow cover 20"" x 20" linen"

Notice the 2 double quotes next to the first number, but only a single one after the second number.

And this one:

"Acme store blue linen pillow cover 20"" x 20""

Notice that the 2 double quotes after the second number get interpreted as a single double quote, but there's no other double quote to reflect the end of this column value.

So how does a seller fix this?

The easiest way to fix this is to open the file in a simple text editor, find the offending rows and values, and add the extra double quotes where needed. Fortunately, you can import and delete files within your Seller Ledger account until it works.

There's also the option to replace the use of double quotes with actual words like "inches".