Baiord reads your fees from eBay's Finances ledger — the same transactions that build your eBay statement — rather than estimating them from a fee table. If eBay charged it, Baiord has the transaction.
The fee types you will see
| Label | What it is |
|---|---|
| Final value fee | eBay's percentage of the sale |
| Per-order fee | The fixed amount per order |
| International fee | Charged on a cross-border sale |
| Promoted listing | Your advertising cost on that sale |
| Regulatory fee | Where your marketplace applies one |
| Shipping label | An outbound label bought through eBay |
| Dispute fee | Charged when a payment dispute goes against you |
| Other fee | Anything else eBay bills on the order |
Baiord reads fees in both shapes eBay publishes them: itemised on the sale transaction, and as standalone charges linked to the order only by reference. Promoted Listings is billed the second way. Reading only the first shape understated fees on 29 of one seller's 44 orders in a single month, which is why both are read.
Why fees arrive after the sale
Because eBay books them when it books them. An order shows up in eBay's order feed the moment it is placed; the fees land in the Finances ledger afterwards. Baiord pulls finances every 15 minutes, so a new sale typically has its fees within the hour.
Why a fee can change
eBay revises charges. A fee amount is rewritten on re-sync when it does, which is the correct behaviour — your books should hold what eBay actually charged, not what it first said.
Promoted Listings in particular is settled weeks after a sale, and handed back when a buyer is refunded. So any one month's advertising bookings straddle several months of orders in both directions.
Prior-period fee adjustments
When eBay books a fee in one month against an order from another, Baiord does not fold it into either month's fee line. It appears on its own row — Prior-period fee adjustments — on the dashboard breakdown and the P&L.
This is deliberate: hiding it inside this month's fees would make this month look worse for no reason you could trace, and pushing it into a month you already reported would change a figure you had given someone.
Fees on orders Baiord does not hold
eBay sometimes bills a fee against an order from before your start date. Baiord cannot put it on an order it does not have, so it books it as an expense of the month eBay charged it, labelled "eBay fees on orders outside your history".
The money is real and it belongs in your books; it just cannot be attributed to a sale. If that order is ever imported, the fee moves onto it and the expense row disappears in the same instant — the money is in exactly one place at every moment.
The 90-day limit
eBay's Finances ledger only covers about the last 90 days. Beyond that, eBay will not tell anyone what it charged on an order.
So an order older than 90 days with no fees imported shows the word unavailable in the Fees column, not a zero, and it stays out of your profit figures. A zero would claim eBay charged you nothing, which would quietly inflate that order's profit and your month's.
This also sets the limit on how far back your start date can reach, and it is why a long sync outage leaves a permanent gap: if an account was disconnected for months, eBay no longer has the fees for that period. Baiord tells you so rather than pretending — "Some fees from the paused period could not be recovered" — and those orders are named on your P&L rather than silently averaged in.
What is not a fee
- A refund's fee credits — those are credits, and are added back rather than charged again.
- Return postage labels — booked as an expense of the month the label was bought, not re-priced into an order that may have settled long ago.
- Store subscription and insertion fees — they name no order, so they are expenses.
- Dispute holds and releases — cash moving in and out of your balance, not money earned or lost. They appear on Finance, never as a fee.