This is a Help Center article of Channable, the tool for product feed management and marketplace integrations. If you don't have an account yet, sign up for free or learn how to integrate your online shop with eBay.
Do you want to interactively learn how to set up an API in Channable? Learn how to create a Channacademy account in the Channable app through this Help Center article.
Before you start read this first!
- eBay charges listings costs for every time an ad (or listing as eBay calls them) is created. We place ads as "Good Till Cancelled" listings (read more about "GTC" on this eBay page).
- Your eBay connection might expire after using it for a while. This will result in a 'failed API' with an error message. To refresh your connection, follow the steps in this article.
- Before you start. Make sure you are no longer logged in to your eBay account.
Step 1 - Create a new connection
Go to the project you are working in and navigate to the API tab. Click '+ Add new API' and then ‘Add new connection'.
Now, select eBay V2, give the connection a name and click on ‘Connect with eBay’.
Step 2 - Login at eBay
You will automatically be redirected to your eBay environment. Sign in with your email or username and password. Make sure you are not logged in to a different eBay account already.
You need to grant application access to Channable and then you are redirected back to Channable.
Step 3 - Add a new connection
Back in Channable you can finish creating the connection by clicking on 'Add connection'.
Step 4 - Setup new API
Once you have created the new eBay API, you can give the API a name and select the country and unique ID per item. The country setting is used to pull the business policies (i.e. shipping profile) from your eBay account for that specific country. For more information about these business policies please refer to step 5.3 of this article.
In the settings of your eBay API, you also need to select the ‘Status’. There are two options here: Verify-only and Publish. The standard setting is ‘Verify-only’. With the ‘Verify-only’ status, you can activate the API to test for errors without actually publishing anything on eBay. Once you are sure you want to publish your listings on eBay, you can change the status to ‘Publish’.
Click 'Continue' once you are done with these settings.
Note I: If you have selected the ‘Verify-only’ option and activate the API, you will only see the amount of errors in the ‘Preview’ step. You will not see the amount of successful products as you are not publishing anything yet.
Note II: Once you set the Status in the API settings from 'Verify-only' to 'Publish' you will not be able to switch back to the 'Verify-only' mode!
Step 5 - Create your product listings
Follow the four steps below to configure your product listings for eBay.
1. Categories
Setup eBay categories for your products by using the generate categories feature or create new categories from scratch.
2. Rules
Create different rules to optimize your product data. For examples take a look at our common rules support article.
3. Build
In the Build step you can find our preset template for the product listings. All you have to do is to fill it out by clicking on the field itself and selecting the corresponding value. For instance, the field 'Title' should display the 'Title' of your product and so on.
The ‘Item group ID’ field is used to combine multiple items into a single listing. Select the field that contains the group or parent ID of your products here. Later, in the Attribute step, you can select fields to configure the variants of grouped products.
If you are an eBay Store owner, you should also fill in the 'Storefront category ID' & 'Storefront category name' fields. If not, you can leave these fields empty.
Tip! Hover over the question marks next to the fields to see a description of the field and suggestions for possible values.
Note: It used to be mandatory to have EAN/GTIN codes for eBay, but not anymore. For eBay EU: If you do not have EAN/GTIN codes, select ‘EAN’ as ID Type and make sure you select a field that has the value ‘Does not apply’. For eBay US: If you do not have UPC/GTIN codes, select ‘UPC’ as ID Type and make sure you select a field that has the value ‘Does not apply’.
In the Build step you also need to select Profiles for your Shipping, Payment and Return policies. If you have set these policies up but can't find them, you might need to enable them first. For more information, see this link. In Channable, you can automatically select the profiles you have configured in eBay.
Note I: If you want to dynamically configure your profiles (i.e. different profiles for different products), follow this guide.
Note II: The eBay profiles are static values we retrieve from eBay, so you cannot find them in the project fields when trying to select them. Instead, click on the ‘back’ arrow and go to static values. Now you should be able to select the profiles from eBay.
4. Attributes
Next you need to fill in the attributes per category in the Attributes step. See the screenshot below for an example of how the attributes look. A more detailed explanation of what to do in the Attributes step can be found in our Attributes support article.
Note: if you have variants of products, you can configure this in the Attributes step as well. When selecting a field as attribute value, for some fields you can also check the ‘Use as variant attribute’ box. If you have variants you need to do this for at least 1 attribute for each category your variants fall into. Otherwise the products will not appear as variants on eBay. Take into account that not all categories accept variant structure, only the ones that are specified on this page.
Step 6 - Send your product listings to eBay
Important: Channable will create new product listings in your eBay account, it will NOT connect to the products you already have published in your eBay account, so remember to eliminate all your products from your eBay account before sending them through Channable.
Once you have finished configuring your product listings, you can start sending your listings to eBay. If you have not activated the project yet, navigate to ‘Setup > Project settings’ and activate the project. Then, go back to APIs and go to the Settings of your eBay API and activate the API here. When you click on 'Run now' your products will be sent to eBay!
If you have still selected ‘Verify-only’ as status, your products will not appear on eBay yet. Instead, you will only see the error feedback from eBay in the Preview step in Channable. When you are ready to publish your listings on eBay, select ‘Publish’ as status and run the API again.
Note: Once you set the Status in the API settings from 'Verify-only' to 'Publish' you will not be able to switch back to the 'Verify-only' mode!
Step 7 - Preview
After you have sent your ads to eBay go to the Preview tab. By clicking on 'errors' you can see which product listings have errors and will not be placed. Click on an error to see what the error message is and which products have that error. When you send your listings with the status ‘Publish’, you will also see the amount of successful products in the Preview step.
Note I: If you get an error on one variant in a listing this error is shown for every variant in said listing.
Note II: Listings are not automatically terminated if the stock is 0. So if a listing needs to be terminated it must be excluded from Channable.