As a valued partner, it’s our mission to help you optimize your traffic and earnings with a variety of tools created specifically to give you deep, rich insights. Our reports are a great way to check your performance, and the Transaction Detail Report (TDR) will enable you to analyze your account performance at a detailed level.

 

From click timestamps and campaign IDs, through to the specific items bought, the TDR gives you crucial insight into how effective your campaigns are, why your conversion rate is what it is, and what you can do to improve.

 

Your window into your audience

The data-packed TDR will show you what was purchased, when the transaction happened, and what you earned from the sale. It will give you a clear picture of what’s working – and potentially what isn’t – across specific campaigns, tools, and time frames. You’ll also gain a better understanding of where your commissions are coming from, which will empower you to best promote the listings to grow conversion with your audience.

 

Viewing your TDR

This report is simple to access, email, or download, with these steps:

  1. Log in to the eBay Partner network portal.
  2. Select Transaction Detail under the “Reports” dropdown menu.
  3. Click the date range under the heading to open up a larger dialog to select a specific date range for the report, or select one of the predefined ranges (such as Today, Yesterday, Last 30 Days, This Year). Click Apply.
  4. Under Date Type, you can select either Event Date, which is when the transaction was first recorded for a purchased item, or Update Date, which is when information for that transaction was last updated.
  5. Under the Status dropdown, it is set to show all transactions, but you can change this to only show Approved, Pending, or Reversed transactions.
  6. Under Vertical Category, you can enter the eBay category you want to filter the report to show, such as Collectibles.
  7. Under Checkout Site, you can filter your report by entering the country code (such as US, DE, FR) to show on which eBay site your traffic made its purchases.
  8. Your report will display on your screen. You can select the envelope icon to email this report to someone, or the download icon to save it to your computer.

Helpful hints on interpreting key columns

 

This article will help you learn what every column on the Transaction Detail Report includes.

 

But the primary columns on which you should focus are:

  • Update Date, which is the timestamp that represents the last time the record was updated. If the record was never updated since the initial transaction, Event Date and Update Date will have the same timestamp.
  • Campaign Name shows the Campaign you selected for your tracking link. If you use more Campaigns than the standard Default one, this grants you visibility into individual promotions or pages based on how you built and used the links (i.e. “Black Friday 2019” or “Electronics Deals”).
  • The Tool Name column shows you which tool was used to create the link that led to this transaction. The Tool Name maps to the Tool ID in the previous column which is one of the parameters in your affiliate links.
  • The Checkout Site column lets you know from which eBay site the transaction came. This will show all of your checkout sites, unless you selected a single checkout site in the report filters.
  • Meta Category ID is the category ID for an item. If you notice a trend in this number, it is safe to assume your audience is shopping within a specific category
  • The fields that show you your revenue, which you can use to tailor your promotions and share more items within this category, include:
    • Sales is the price the consumer paid.
    • Quantity is how many of a specific item sold in that transaction.
    • Earnings is the amount you made for that purchase.
  • User Frequency indicates how often the user who made this transaction makes purchases on eBay. 
  • Event Date is the timestamp of when your shoppers completed their purchases. Displayed in a new column on the far left of the report, you’ll be able to use this information to adjust the timing of your campaigns to reach your audience when they are most likely to buy.
  • Landing Page URL tells you which page the user landed on when they arrived at an eBay site. This can tell you which of the pages you link to leads to the most transactions.

Additional changes on the platform

One of the changes on our new platform is that we moved away from using transaction IDs that were specific to the eBay Partner Network to eBay Transaction IDs. Those Partner Network IDs used to map to the eBay Transaction ID, whereas now, both systems use the same Transaction ID.

 

Another similar change is that auction items will no longer have a specific eBay transaction ID, instead the item ID is used as the transaction ID. This is a unique identifier for auctions and there won’t be multiple instances where different transactions have the same transaction ID:

  • Buy It Now items – This will use a unique eBay transaction ID that will be the same in both the eBay Checkout Transaction ID and Partner Network Transaction ID fields.
  • Auction Items – The item ID will be the transaction ID. This ID will be in the Partner Network Transaction ID field and there will be a 0 in the eBay Checkout Transaction ID field.

Interpreting the data

While the data about items purchased and related commissions is always interesting, it’s also helpful when it comes to providing context around any negative earnings transactions. For instance, you might see that a purchased item has been returned.

 

To illustrate how this situation might look on the TDR:

 

On November 23, a set of Magic The Gathering cards was purchased and you earned $6 in commissions. The person who bought it decided to return it a week later, on November 30.  On December 1, the return was posted and the earnings were reversed, so if you looked at the Performance by Day report for November 23, it would be $6 lower than it was before this return. If you look at the transaction for that item, the Event Date would remain November 23, when the item was first purchased, and the Update Date would now be December 1.

 

The fact that returns can happen up to 30 days apart is another reason why this report is beneficial. You’ll be able to filter your results to show all the Update Dates, so you can see when transactions are updated with new information. It also helps you understand that there was nothing you did or didn’t do that may have impacted your bottom line -- it was part of the normal flow of business. 

 

How the TDR works

The TDR is updated every 10 to 15 hours. It's a set of columns that frame your data with context, to tell the story of your performance. It gives you a detailed window into the shopping behaviors of your audience, and helps you make informed decisions about what tools to use, and what product categories to feature (among other insights). By continually evaluating the outcomes of your transactions, you can increase your earnings and improve your performance.