Sales Documents Need Improvement

Dear all,

I'd like to kick off a discussion to help Garmin improve their sales and tax documents for merchants. I sent my suggestions to [email protected] already, but I probably missed something, so please chime in.

September is over and I need to generate my monthly business report. Up to now, the only way to retrieve information on the sales of my apps is to generate a "Sales Report" in my Merchant Account / Documents. It is positive, that generation of that reports takes just a few minutes instead of the indicated 2-3 work days. But the contents of the report is by far not enough to control my small business and take appropriate decisions (for example on pricing).

When requesting the report for a certain period of time, the returned transactions don't always match. Older transactions are included, the last few days are missing. When can we expect a transaction to be finished / not altered anymore? I would assume after settlement date. Therefore after 3 days the sales report should reflect all transactions prior to this date, correctly. When I request a report for September (1-30) today (Oct 4th), some sales are still missing (I assume) for Sep 29 and 30.
I received 2 payouts from Garmin on Oct 1st. I can not match these amounts to the numbers in the sales report. To comply to German tax regulations, I need to be able to do track income vs invoices, exactly.
The transactions in the CSV file should be sorted by date/time.
The CSV file contains a strange text format for timestamps (Transaction / Settlement Date). Please use something common to spreadsheet software, so the timestamps can be imported correctly without further processing. Maybe even add UTC instead of Garmin's local time zone?
For each transaction please include more financial figures than just the net. We need tax deduced, credit card fees and exchange fees that were applied.
Please include totals for the financial figures.
To set the appropriate price point, the conversion rate is generally regarded as a key indicator. The conversion rate is the ratio of successful sales divided by the number of users that clicked on an app in the store. Please include the number of users that clicked on an app in the store in the requested period of time for each app.

I'm aware, that the merchant program was started just 2 months ago and I assume that Garmin is working on improvements pretty hard. But I think my requests are pretty basic. Up to now I was working with Stripe.com as payment processor. They provide all what I wrote above in a sort of dashboard for full transparency.

Roboleo-Apps

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Rick 2 months ago

Agree 110% - I've been receiving amounts into my bank account for August that were $30 less than indicated on the sales report and for September it was around $90 more than shown on the sales report.

Maybe the key problem is in the name. ie Sales Report. I don't want or need a sales report I need an up to date Statement of my Account.

Can I ask if you were missing any money from your August account ? I was told that US$10 is being retained by each of the stores (European & American), which is why i was missing AUD$30 from my August sales.

I have asked via direct emails for the sales report to be updated to show all sales, including those sales that are discounted to $0 by use of a coupon, and like you mentioned to show all deductions, retentions of funds and so on. I'm not running a business as such, but I need to be able to trust that Garmin and it's partners are handling my sales correctly and dispersing the money has per the contracted arrangement. I have not been able to do this in the first two months of store operation.

Roboleo1010 2 months ago in reply to Rick

Rick,

I'm on the Garmin program just since mid of September. In September, I received more money than expected, which seems to be good - but shows the lack of transparency in the process. I'm expecting that things will improve over time with a little push from our side.

As positive side effects I see less customer service required. Our main work in that regard was (with out long-term payment provider) helping customers to unlock their app. And quite a bunch of people don't like to click on an external payment link, as they expect some sort of phishing/fraud.

I'm hoping that Garmin will add more payment options in their process. We had 25% payments through Paypal. WeChat Pay and AliPay is very common in China, these options should be added, too.

Roboleo-Apps 1 month ago

Hi,

I'd like to give an update to the sales report / transparency issue. One week ago, I received an email from ConnectIQ stating:

There are improvements planned and in progress, but we don’t have any details that we can share at this time.

Just to illustrate how inaccurate the sales report is: On October 20th, we started to track the sales on the Garmin-Pay platform on our own.

In the period Oct 20th to Oct 31st (as of today, that time period should be finalized)

73 copies of our apps were installed by customers, whereas

45 sales are stated in the sales report

As returns have been around 1%, this is not a relevant contribution. So we are missing about 38% of all sales what is completely in-acceptable! Garmin needs to rectify this situation as soon as possible.

Right now, I don't say that Garmin is under-paying us, as they simply send money in two transactions without further notice on the time period, covered. An easy way to solve that annoyance: When issuing those bank transactions, they could simply send an email including information on the finalized time period.

The information above was sent to Garmin too.

AV82 1 month ago in reply to Roboleo-Apps

I've been in the program since mid September as well. The October report was the first substantial report and disbursement of funds for my apps. I had a big sales surge in late October (I'm able to track sales on my send via some code to see what is downloaded and installed) that didn't show up. If you look at the report it stops showing downloads after 27 OCT because they weren't resolved by the 29th of Oct. This left out the surge sales at the end. I expect to see them in the NOV report.

I agree it is very difficult to cross reference the current report with my own tracking, but it's a start. Personally I much prefer this Garmin process to the 3d party sales process I was using with PayPal and some code. Garmin has a long history of improving their products over time so I am hoping this follows that trend. They also tend to do a good job of listening to user input and requests. Improvements are not overnight but they do happen. Personally, I'm happy with the start but hope to see steady improvement in the report.

AV82 1 month ago in reply to AV82

What I would like to see improvement in is the coupon code creation and distribution process. That is so slow it's very difficult to anticipate how long it will take.

Roboleo-Apps 16 days ago in reply to Roboleo-Apps

Maybe I'm the only one deeply frustrated by this situation. Another month passed without any (?) improvement on the sales report.

Compared to the payments we received (which by the way works very well), just half of the total is reflected in the sales report! As we track installs at customers since 6 weeks, we know that the payments from Garmin are correct.... Our tracking results in 10% higher numbers compared to the payment, which is easily explained by some returns + some users installing the app on more than one device.

Not sure how the German tax authorities will like this: (Number of apps sold) x (price per app) doesn't match to the income (at all).... But that's two or three month down the road. I'll try to defer them to Garmin directly ;-)