Problem with Sales & Payments CSV download

Interestingly I’ve just looked at Lulu’s latest rendering of sales figures and history and was pleasantly surprised to see history for some 15 years or more.
Quite amazed just how books I’ve sold in that time.
Before the upgrade I’m sure only recent months history was available.

I have just pinned down one discrepancy between the November CSV and the one I downloaded today. The November CSV contains a duplicate row for an order we placed on 29 February 2016. This order was for a single proof copy before we ordered our first batch to start selling locally. The November CSV contained this single row twice, but with the duplicate out of date sequence, making it harder to spot.

The duplicate has disappeared from today's CSV, giving the impression that we sold -1 copies between the dates in question.

Following Lulu's botched migration, their new CSV layout has 29 columns per sale. It is therefore proving complex to compare these two CSVs. My best method so far is to create a spreadsheet with 58 columns (i.e. the two CSVs of 29 columns each, side-by-side, row-by-row). To the right of those columns, I am adding Excel formulae to compare each pair of cells. The syntax is along the lines of:

=IF(A1=AD1," ","Unequal")

The nerds among you will get the idea. The result of the formula displays "unequal" when compared cells are different. But, each time, I then have to remove the spurious row and reset the formulae on the remaining columns.

If anyone has a quicker method (Well I am assuming some of you may still be reading this:-)), I would be grateful to know.

Untrue!! I downloaded Lulu's CSV of book sales in November 2020 and provided a sales analysis to my local history society committee based on that data. Today, downloading the same data, it's different!

Cannot someone who works for Lulu at least explain what is going on? Two CSVs covering the same historical period should surely be identical. But they aren't. You say "eager to criticise", but that's not true. The data has changed under my feet and I need to know why.

If it was your bank, you'd be furious.

This is not the first instance of alterations in the CSV's. I noticed changes in mine a few months ago. I got the impression that in the background there have been some significant changes in the way Amazon, etc communicate this information to Lulu's system and Lulu has to play catch-up getting things corrected.

I like to think they are trying to become more real-time, but I'm trying to view the glass as half full too. It IS frustrating.

I agree. I just checked my report. Ten books? I never sell just ten books. I've had trust issues with Lulu for long time. No way at all to prove or know exactly what we have sold. We are at the mercy of Lulu for each report. As you said you received hundreds of ratings last month. I've noticed too on Amazon my amount of ratings for one of my better selling books went way up. Moving me from 3.6 to a 4 star rating. So theire had to be more sales. I finally received a response from support for an email I sent before Christmas. They are now looking into why my book is missing from all websites. My sales too have dropped. I have six books still missing from websites for over three months now. I was told they were being added back. They are still not there after one month of hearing this response. So that is seven books missing and not making money. And these are the books that do sell well for me. I've already told support if they haven't fixed things very soon I'm leaving. There are better sites to use without all the drama. I'm seriously thinking of retiring my last book and moving it to Streetlib. It will give me chance to try them out. But in the U.S. they don't do paperbacks so not sure what to do there. I want sites that use PayPal my experience with them has been very good.