Revising a Listing

Sellers often need to change elements of a currently active listing. Typically, the change makes the item more appealing to buyers.

Subtopics

Overview

Qualifications to Revise an Item

Using the VerifyOnly Field to Test Your Changes

Item Changes Allowed During Revisions

Revising Multiple-Choice (Unbounded) Fields

Revising a Category

Revising eBay for Charity Listings

Revising Fixed-Priced Items After Purchases are Made

Removing/Changing a Field When Revising an Item

Changing Payment Methods When Revising an Item

Revising US eBay Motors Listings

Revising Items with Product Details (Catalogs)

Changing a Listing Start Price

Reducing Reserve Price

Using Listing Recommendations

Overview

An item that is still active on the eBay site may be changed by the seller. This is known as revising an item. When an item is revised, the seller can specify a new value for one or multiple elements of the item's definition or remove an element. To revise an listing, use ReviseItem. This call is directly analogous to the Revise Your Item (RYI) page on the eBay site.

Note: eBay does not distinguish between listing in your eBay Store and regular eBay listings. The rules for revising these listings are the same.

There are certain rules that govern what can be changed when a listing has bids or is within 12 hours of the end of the listing. For information regarding the rules for revising a listing see, Restrictions on revising listings.

If you are only changing a listing's price or quantity, consider using ReviseInventoryStatus instead of ReviseItem or ReviseFixedPriceItem.

Revising an item using ReviseItem or ReviseFixedPriceItem entails these basic steps:

  1. Specify the item to revise (by its item ID) in Item.ItemID.
  2. Specify the item fields to add or change.

For addition information, see the following pages.

Rules for Revising Items

https://ebaydts.com/eBayKBDetails?KBid=732

Errors Related To Listing Policies

Listing Policies

Best Match With Multi-variation Listings

Listing with multiple variations

Best Match and the Item's Rank in Search Results

Considering Best Match When Revising and Relisting Items

Qualifications to Revise an Item

To revise an item, the following conditions must be met:

Additionally for auctions, there are restrictions on what can be changed based on whether the listing has bids and based on whether the listing will end within twelve hours. For more on this, see Item Changes Allowed During Revisions

Using the VerifyOnly Field to Test Your Changes

You can use the VerifyOnly boolean field with the flag set to 'true' in ReviseItem, if you want the response to include the calculated listing price change (if there is an increase in the BIN/Start price) but you do not want the values to persist in the database.

Including the VerifyOnly field in ReviseItem is similar to using VerifyAddItem or VerifyRelistItem to test calls before you actually add or relist the item.

Item Changes Allowed During Revisions

Making changes to an item's listing using ReviseItem is subject to a few restrictions, depending on whether any bids have been placed on the item, and whether the change is being attempted within twelve hours of the end of the auction. In general, you cannot change the listing format (e.g., auction vs. fixed-price) of any listing. For a complete list of what can be changed for auction, fixed-price, and classified ad listings, see Restrictions on revising listings.

The next few subsections of this chapter provide details that you should understand when revising certain features via the API, such as item specifics, eBay Motors details, payment methods, and more. Additional information may be provided in other sections of this guide, where applicable.

For a list of the fields that can be modified in the API, see ReviseItem and ReviseFixedPriceItemin the eBay Trading API Reference).

Revising Multiple-Choice (Unbounded) Fields

Because ReviseItem replaces only item properties that are included in the input ItemType object and list of properties changed, be careful when updating properties that are made up of multiple choice options, such as shipping option. In these cases, specify all intended options. For instance, if the listing already has options #1 and #2 and the revision change is to add option #3, include all three in the property of the input ItemType object.

Revising a Category

If you change the category, please note that the CategoryMappingAllowed flag is transient. If it was specified as true when the item was originally listed, it will not automatically be set to true when you revise the item. Therefore, it should be specified again as a new property. See Mapping Old Category IDs to Current IDs.

Revising eBay for Charity Listings

You cannot use ReviseItem or ReviseFixedPriceItem to modify eBay for Charity items. See Working with Listings that Benefit Nonprofits for additional information.

Revising Fixed-Priced Items After Purchases are Made

You can revise a multi-quantity fixed-price listing after buyers have purchased items from it. In these cases, GetItem normally returns the latest (revised) details of the listing.

If a buyer purchases items from a multi-quantity fixed-price listing, eBay saves a snapshot of the listing as it was at the time of the purchase. The TransactionID of the order is associated with that snapshot. Sellers and buyers can retrieve the snapshot of the listing by calling GetItem and passing TransactionID in the request. (The snapshot is also available in GetItemTransactions and related calls.)

Sellers of an item are allowed to view any purchase snapshots of the listing (any transaction or order), whereas buyers can only view the purchase snapshots for which they are the successful buyer. Order line items (purchases) can be viewed for up to 90 days from the creation date.

If you are using Notifications, you can set the order line item event to trigger your notifications or use an event related to the entire listing. Be aware that if you're using item purchase snapshot data, fields like ListingStatus may report an Active status (because the listing was Active on the order line item (transaction) date), but the listing may actually have ended.

Removing/Changing a Field When Revising an Item

Just like with the RelistItem, when you use ReviseItem changing fields is subject to the rules described in Item Changes Allowed During Revisions and in the ReviseItem Call Reference.

The way you remove/change a field depends on the field. For example, to remove a boolean field, set the value to 'false'. To remove a string, you use DeletedField. Refer to the RelistItem documentation for information about how to remove/change specific fields.

For an example of a request to change fields, see Sample XML for Modifying and Removing Fields.

Changing Payment Methods When Revising an Item

A listing must have at least one valid payment method, but you can change it when you revise the item.

When revising the payment method for an item, you need to pass in the entire set of payment methods. For example, if you had 4 payments methods for the item and you want to replace one of them, you cannot just delete the old one and pass in a new one. Instead you must specify the entire set of payment methods you want in the ReviseItem call.

Revising US eBay Motors Listings

In addition to the normal rules for revising listings, the following rules apply for US eBay Motors listings:

Fees Overview

https://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html

When retrieving items from the US eBay Motors site, GetItem returns information about changes to Buy It Now and reserve prices in the ReviseStatus property of the Item object.

Revising Items with Product Details (Catalogs)

Items in certain categories can have details whose values are well known and don't vary from listing to listing. Instead of filling in this standard information for every listing, a seller can create a listing in which this information has already been partially filled out (pre-filled). This data is called product details.

When an auction item has bids or the listing ends in fewer than 12 hours, you cannot change the product ID and you cannot remove the product from the listing. However, you can change the values of the IncludeStockPhotoURL, UseStockPhotoURLAsGallery, and IncludePrefilledItemInformation flags. (This restriction does not apply to fixed-price listings.)

When an auction item has no bids and does not end within 12 hours, you can use ReviseItem to add, modify, or remove product details.

If an item is listed with product details and you change the relevant category, you need to make sure the new category is mapped to the characteristics set associated with the product. The product data must always be consistent with at least one of the listing's categories. If the item already includes product details, but that information is inconsistent with the new category, you must remove the product information or replace it with new product information that is consistent.

These are the common scenarios when revising an item with product details:

Changes to product data in the system do not affect an existing listing. Therefore, the product ID and any pre-filled data that was present at the time of the AddItem request remains constant at the time of the ReviseItem request.

After executing ReviseItem with product details, you should compare the response to the request to make sure that the data that was actually listed matches the data that you sent. For example, if you changed the value of an item specific but the value is now pre-filled in the catalog, the pre-filled value overrides the value you send in.

Changing a Listing Start Price

When you revise an item, you can change the listing start price. However, if you reduce the start price, the insertion fee is not credited (for the US site and other participating sites). The insertion fee is based on the maximum price the item has had in its life cycle.

Reducing Reserve Price

Sellers can lower Reserve Prices on listings on the US eBay site, eBay UK site, or eBay Motors site, even after bids have been placed, to increase the likeliness of their items selling. To determine whether a site or category supports this capability, call GetCategories and check the ReduceReserveAllowed and ORRA fields. See Determining Whether a Category Supports Reserve Prices. Depending on the site and category, you also may need to call GetCategoryFeatures and check MinimumReservePrice.

When a category supports lowering the reserve, a seller can adjust the reserve price through the Revise Your Item process or by using ReviseItem, as long as no bids have exceeded the original reserve price. For most categories, this is only allowed when 12 or more hours remain for the listing. The reserve price can be reduced downwards to a minimum of one bid increment above the listing's current price. Once the reserve has been lowered, bidders are notified of the change via email, My eBay, and the listing itself.

If the item has no bids, set ReservePrice to any value within this range:

If the item has bids, set ReservePrice to a value within this range:

If the new reserve price is lower than the high bidder's proxy bid, the proxy bid is also reduced to one increment below the new bid price, to prevent bidders from unexpectedly becoming winning bidders when their prior bid had not yet met the Reserve price. For example, imagine a US listing starts at $1 with a reserve of $100, and the first bidder bids $75. The current price stays at $1 since the bid didn't meet the reserve. Then, if the seller then reduces reserve to $50, the bidder's proxy bid is reduced to one bid increment below $50. For a chance at becoming a winning bidder, the bidder would need to place another bid.

No credit is given for Reserve Price Fee if the listing is revised to reduce the Reserve Price.

For additional information on lowering the Reserve Price on Motors, see Revising US eBay Motors Listings.

Using Listing Recommendations

Listing Recommendations are used by eBay sellers to retrieve eBay-generated listing recommendations. These listing recommendations can then be used by the seller to improve or bring listings up to standard. The Listing Recommendation types (classifications) are Category (recommended categories for miscategorized items), Condition Description (for used items missing a Condition Description), eTRS (eBay Top-Rated Seller requirements), GSP (items eligible for the Global Shipping Program), Item Specifics (mandatory and recommended Item Specifics), Picture (picture requirments in listings), and UPC (recommendation to use product codes to create a quality listing).

To retrieve Listing Recommendations in the response of an Add/Revise/Relist/Verify API call, include and set the IncludeRecommendations field to 'true' in the request of the call.

For more information on Listing Recommendations, see the ListingRecommendationType definition.

https://developer.ebay.com/Devzone/XML/docs/Reference/eBay/types/ListingRecommendationType.html