As you may already know, PayPal limits the usage of ebay gift cards to $5,000 per rolling 180 days per account. Why does that matter? Because ebay gift cards can frequently be found at a discount from various promotions and websites which can then be used to buy items on ebay at a steep discount. Whether you’re buying things for yourself on ebay or a bunch of stuff to resell, the discounted ebay gift cards can make or break a deal. Unfortunately, I bumped into the gift card usage limit myself earlier this year. At that time, I only knew I had hit the limit because the PayPal CS rep told me I did and there was no easy way I knew of to track my usage. The rolling 180 days makes tracking it particularly difficult because there isn’t simply a day of the year where it all resets. Luckily, a reader pointed me to the download feature on PayPal and I’m going to walk you through the steps to check your own ebay gift card usage below.
The High Level Flow For Checking Your ebay Gift Card Usage
- Log into PayPal
- Download Transactions for the past 180 days
- Filter those Transactions by “PayPal Gift Card Services, Inc.”
- Sum up the Total
Downloading Your PayPal Transactions
After logging into PayPal, it’s possible to get to the download activity page by navigating to Activity, then Statements, then Activity export. Or you can navigate directly to the Download History page by clicking the following link (make sure you’ve already logged in):
Direct Link to PayPal Download History Page
Once on the page, you will want to set the File Types For Download to “Comma Delimited – All Activity” and the Custom Date Range to the past 180 days. If you want to be precise, this webpage will tell you the exact date that was 180 days ago:
Direct Link to Check What Date was 180 days ago
Otherwise, you can get a really close estimate of your gift card usage by simply subtracting 6 months from the current day:
Once you’ve set the correct date and the type of file you want, you can hit the Download History button and wait for your .csv file to process. This may take some time, especially if you’ve had a lot of transactions on PayPal in the past 180 days. It actually timed out the first time I tried, but worked successfully after a minute or so the second time.
Opening The Downloaded CSV File
Once you’ve successfully downloaded the .csv file, you’ll want to open it with either Excel, Google Sheets, or other similar spreadsheet program. I’m going to use Google Sheets below because it’s free and everyone should have access to it, but the steps will be similar with any spreadsheet program.
In Google Sheets, you will want to select the Open File Picker folder icon in the upper right:
In the Open a File window that appears, select the Upload tab. Then either drag the previously downloaded file onto the page, or click Select a file from your computer and navigate to the file that way. The file is most likely contained in your Downloads folder with a filename of “Download.csv”.
Checking Your Ebay Gift Card Usage
Once you have selected the file to upload, you should be placed into a brand new Google Sheet with all of your PayPal transaction information from the past 180 days. Now we just need to filter out the non-gift card transactions and sum up the total! Both of these tasks are very easy in Google Sheets.
First you will want to select the Filter options from the Data dropdown menu at the top:
Then you will be able to click the small arrow in the Name column to filter out anything that isn’t a gift card transaction. First hit Clear to remove all of the unwanted choices and then ONLY select “PayPal Gift Card Services, Inc.“. This will include both ebay gift card Redemptions and Reversals if you have had any refunds put back into ebay gift cards.
Once you have filtered out all the non-gift card transactions following the steps above, the only thing left to do is sum up the total! The easiest way to do this is to simply highlight the entire Amount column by clicking the letter above (probably G):
After you have highlighted the column, Google Sheets will automatically calculate the sum of the columns and put in the bottom right corner of the page:
That’s it! The Sum displayed is how much in ebay gift cards you have used in the past 180 days. To find out how much additional in ebay gift cards you can use, subtract the Sum shown from $5,000. In my case, I can use an additional $1727.70! Time to start buying ebay gift cards again.
HT to Lenny who first showed me how to check ebay gift card usage
Very useful and seminal article.
I hit $5,001.75. 🙁
Perfect timing, great post Noah..Thank you!
Not working for me because of the summation formula. If you take the sum of the range J1:J300 for instance, that would consider all of your Paypal transactions and not just the filtered values that are hidden. You can note that on the left showing the row numbers you’ll see something like: 4,67,70,78, etc. These are the rows you want to add but doing sum(1:78) does the hidden values as well
Doh, I needlessly overcomplicated things. Now that I reread your post I see NOT to use a function, just look at the bottom right for the automatic display
For all those curious also, I figured out how to use a function to sum only visible data. Its the subtotal() function and you would use the 109 code to sum only visible data. So it would be something like SUBTOTAL(109,J1:J300)
Wow, what an article. Good one Noah. I loved the post.
Great article. Just want to add that the column names can differ from what you stated. For example there is no Amount column in my export, I had to look at the Gross column.
awesome post, this rocks!
unfortunately I’m at $4,902 =/
I use this all the time now. Thanks again for sharing
Mine is only $285, but can’t use eBay gift card to buy a eBay gift card. Does anybody know why?
I’m not finding this to work as well anymore. It doesn’t work at all for Business Accounts. Any thoughts on that?
Even for personal, not all my gift cards are listed under Paypal Gift Card Services. Many do not have that on the CSV, and I can only see the GC by looking at secondary transactions.
I’m having to do it more or less manually now, which is a pain. This was awesome while it lasted for me.
Appears to still be working for me. Which part isn’t working for you?
If your gift card usage isn’t showing up as “PayPal Gift Card Services, Inc.” for the “Name” column, what are they showing up as?
If the “Name” column isn’t consistent anymore for you, it might be possible to filter based on the “Type” column by selecting “Gift Certificates and Cards Redemption” as the filter. I believe this could include non-ebay gift cards redeemed through PayPal though (if such a thing exists).