Does FreeAgent Integrate with eBay? (And How to Fix the Gap)

FreeAgent has no direct integration with eBay. That gap costs UK sellers hours every month and causes accounting errors.

What FreeAgent actually needs from eBay

FreeAgent works best when you record every transaction correctly as it happens. For eBay sellers, that means:

• Sales recorded as invoices, dated to the sale, not the payout
• eBay fees (final value fees, promoted listing fees) recorded as bills
• Postage costs recorded separately as expenses
• Refunds recorded as credit notes, linked back to the original sale
• VAT handled correctly depending on whether you're VAT-registered

The problem is eBay pays you in payouts: a net lump sum every few days that bundles together dozens of individual transactions. If you just record the payout as income, you're understating gross sales and losing visibility of what you're actually paying in fees.

Why the gap is a real accounting problem

Recording eBay payouts as income instead of individual transactions causes three issues:

1. Wrong gross turnover — HMRC cares about your total sales, not your net payouts. If you're approaching the VAT threshold (£90,000), understating this is a risk.
2. Missing expense deductions — eBay fees and postage are legitimate business expenses. If they're netted off your income rather than recorded separately, you're potentially paying more tax than you need to.
3. Reconciliation headaches — Your FreeAgent bank feed shows payout amounts. If your invoices don't match those amounts, reconciliation becomes a manual puzzle every month.

What most eBay sellers do (and why it doesn't scale)

The most common workaround is downloading eBay's transaction report as a CSV, manually entering sales into FreeAgent, and trying to match them against bank payouts. This works when you have 10 transactions a month. At 100+, it breaks down fast.

Some sellers pay their accountant extra to do the reconciliation. This is accurate but expensive and still takes them time to gather the data.

The correct approach: transaction-level sync

The right way to handle eBay in FreeAgent is to sync at the transaction level, not the payout level. Here's how each eBay transaction type maps to a FreeAgent document:

Every sale becomes an invoice. Every fee becomes a bill. Every refund becomes a credit note. Payouts reconcile automatically because the maths adds up.

How to set it up with TransactionMerge

TransactionMerge connects to both eBay and FreeAgent via their official APIs and handles this automatically every night.

1. Connect your eBay account via OAuth (no passwords shared)
2. Connect your FreeAgent account via OAuth
3. Choose a start date — latest payout for the cleanest opening, or a full UK tax year if you want historical records
4. TransactionMerge backfills from that date and runs automatically every night

After the initial backfill, you don't need to do anything.

Summary

FreeAgent does not integrate natively with eBay. The gap is real and causes genuine accounting problems for UK sellers: incorrect gross turnover, missing expense deductions, and reconciliation issues.

The fix is transaction-level sync, not payout recording. TransactionMerge automates this entirely, so your FreeAgent accounts reflect what actually happened on eBay, correctly categorised and dated.

Join the beta — it's free →