eBay User Roles
The users who participate in activities on eBay, whether through the site or an application, do so in a variety of roles.
Subtopics
The role a given eBay user plays at any given juncture is not the only role that user can play at other times. A user may be a seller (one user role) in one order andkl be a buyer (another user role) in another order. An eBay membership is generic in terms of user roles. That is, there is no membership type specific to sellers and another to buyers. A user simply acts in one role or capacity as they need or want to do, under the same user identity.
Registered eBay Users
Anyone may visit an eBay site, browse items offered for sale, peruse the available jobs list, and read the online help for the site. But to do anything meaningful—like selling and buying items—a user must become a registered eBay user. Becoming an eBay member is free and registration is easy. Registering supplies eBay with a means to contact the user and results in the user having a unique user ID.
Interactions on eBay are relatively anonymous. While searching for and browsing listings, a user will only see the seller's and other buyers'/bidders' user IDs, and not their real names. Interactions on eBay are not, however, completely anonymous. eBay does have a real name and contact method for each user, and the seller will see their order partner's (buyer's) real name if that name is a part of the shipping address.
Application Developers
An application developer is one who develops API applications or the representative of a company that develops such applications. In the case of the latter, the company may have hired one or more developers to write the program's code, but the user referred to as "application developer" in this context is the one who interacts with the eBay Developers Program.
To develop applications that interact with eBay through the APIs and/or SDKs, a user must register an account with the eBay Developer's Program. After registering, they will use these account credentials to log into the developer portal, and their account ID will be associated with the AppID that is needed to run eBay APIs.
As a developer, you will want to test your APIs using the eBay Sandbox environment. To do this, you will need to create several Sandbox user accounts, with each account representing different, fictitious eBay buyers and sellers. These account IDs will only be valid for the Sandbox, and cannot be used on the production eBay site.
For more information about getting your developer keys, such as the AppID, see Getting Your Keys. For information about the Sandbox, see Testing in the SandBox.
Sellers
A seller is an eBay user selling an item on eBay. To sell an item on eBay, a person must be a registered eBay user, and must also set up a selling account.
Store Owners
A store owner is an eBay user who has an eBay Stores subscription. With an eBay Stores subscription, a seller gets an eBay Stores storefront. See eBay Stores for more information.
To own an eBay Store and sell a items in that Store, a person must be a registered eBay user.
Bidders and Buyers
Bidders and buyers are the users who are either buying an item or who are attempting to do so by becoming the winning bidder for an auction item.
A bidder is a user who makes a bid on an item in an auction listing. Competing with other bidders in a series of progressively higher bids, a bidder vies to be the highest bidder when the listing ends. A bidder who is the high bidder (and also meets the Reserve Price, if set) when an auction listing ends is deemed the winning bidder and is able to purchase the item from the seller.
A buyer is a user who has or is able to purchase an item from the seller. In auction listings, a user is only able to purchase the item after the listing has ended and the user is the winning bidder for the item. For fixed-price listings (and auction listings with an active Buy It Now option), a user simply purchases the item at the specified fixed price.