Etsy gives you two order exports. Using both doubles your revenue.

Etsy does not have "the orders export." It has two, and they describe the same sales in different shapes:

• Orders — one row per order
• Order Items — one row per item within an order

Download both, drop them in the same folder or paste them into the same sheet, and every Etsy sale is counted twice. There is no error message. The total is simply twice as big, and — this is the part that costs you — it still looks plausible. A good month and a double-counted mediocre month produce the same number.

How to tell which one you're holding

Open the file and look at one order that contained more than one item.

If you cannot find a multi-item order to check, sort by order id and look for repeats. Repeats mean you have the Order Items export.

Which one to use

Use one. Never both in the same calculation.

• Reconciling against your payout — use Orders. One row, one order, one total.
• Working out which products actually sell — use Order Items. It is the only one that knows.
• Need both answers — keep them in separate sheets and never sum across them.

Etsy is not being careless here. The two exports answer two different questions. The trap is that both are called an order export and both open in the same program.

The same trap in a different shape on Shopify

Shopify only gives one export, but it hides a matching problem. It writes one row per line item and leaves order-level fields blank on the second and later rows of an order. Shopify's own documentation says: "Many of the fields are left blank to indicate that multiple items were purchased on the same order."

So filtering by Financial Status keeps only the first row of each order. A refunded three-item order loses its status on rows two and three — and those rows stay in your totals.

Fill the blanks down before you filter (select the column → F5 → Special → Blanks → type = and the cell above → Ctrl+Enter), or filter on line-item columns instead. More of these in the four places multi-channel totals silently go wrong.

A 30-second check for any export

Whatever store it came from, before you trust a total:

1. Find one order with more than one item
2. Count how many rows it occupies
3. If more than one row — is the amount repeated, blank, or per-item? All three exist in the wild
4. Add up that one order by hand and compare to what the file says the order total was

One order, done by hand, tells you the shape of the whole file. It is the cheapest check in this entire job and almost nobody does it.

⚠ TWO EXPORTS OF THE SAME SALES — totals are doubled
  etsy_orders.csv and etsy_items.csv share order ids. Keep one, delete the other.

Summary

• Etsy has two order exports — Orders and Order Items — describing the same sales
• Using both in one calculation doubles every sale, with no error shown
• Tell them apart by counting rows for a multi-item order
• Payout reconciliation → Orders. Product performance → Order Items. Never summed together
• Shopify's version of the trap is blank order-level fields on extra line items