Document Management for E-Commerce Sellers
Supplier invoices, shipping receipts, platform statements: e-commerce sellers deal with a unique mix of documents. Here's how to manage them.
The E-Commerce Document Pile
E-commerce sellers deal with a unique variety of documents. Supplier invoices for inventory purchases. Shipping receipts and tracking documents. Platform statements from Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, or eBay. Customs declarations for international shipments. Return receipts and refund documentation. Each one contains data that affects your bottom line.
Many e-commerce sellers run lean operations, often a single person managing everything. The last thing they have time for is hours of data entry from these documents.
Three Document Categories That Matter
Supplier Invoices
Knowing your true cost of goods is essential for pricing decisions and profitability analysis. Every supplier invoice contains the data you need: product quantities, unit costs, shipping charges, and totals. Extract this data into Google Sheets and you have a running record of your inventory costs that you can reference for pricing, reordering, and tax preparation.
Shipping Receipts
Shipping is often the second-largest expense after inventory. Extracting data from shipping receipts and carrier invoices lets you track costs per shipment, identify the most cost-effective carriers, and spot unexpected fee increases. A simple spreadsheet with date, carrier, destination, weight, and cost gives you powerful analysis capabilities.
Platform Statements
Amazon, Shopify, and other platforms send periodic statements with sales, fees, refunds, and net deposits. These statements can be dense and confusing. Extracting the key figures into a spreadsheet makes reconciliation straightforward: match the platform's numbers against your own records and quickly spot discrepancies.
The Weekly Workflow
1. Collect all documents in a dedicated folder (email label, Drive folder, or both).
2. Weekly: batch-upload to Siftly for extraction.
3. Export to category-specific spreadsheets (inventory costs, shipping costs, platform revenue).
4. Quick review and reconciliation.
This weekly routine takes 20-30 minutes and gives you complete financial visibility throughout the year, not just at tax time when it's too late to make adjustments. Your accountant gets clean, categorized data instead of a box of unsorted documents.
Siftly Team
Building tools that turn messy documents into clean, structured data. We write about document automation, data extraction, and smarter workflows for small businesses.