Getting started

This topic contains the following sections:

Before using MIP

MIP requires that you have an eBay seller account to use it. If you don't have an eBay seller account, visit http://pages.ebay.com/sell/sell-getstarted.html and follow the first instruction.

Check the What’s new page for important updates to feed requirements and restrictions.

Do not use MIP with other listing management tools. MIP cannot detect changes made to listings with other tools. Therefore, to prevent duplicate listings and process problems, when you start using MIP to manage your active listings, you must stop uploading, revising, and managing your active listings on all web flows, mobile apps, and third party tools. Use only MIP for all inventory management and order management tasks. However, continue to use eBay.com web flows for the following tasks: feedback, returns, and responding to buyer cases

MIP Sandbox environment

eBay offers a sandbox environment to practice creating, uploading, and downloading feeds. There are several advantages of using this site before you upload feeds to the eBay site:

Creating a sandbox account

  1. Go to the eBay Developers Program page (https://go.developer.ebay.com/).
    1. If you do not have an eBay developer's account, click Register and follow the on-screen instructions to fill out the registration form.
    2. If you already have a developers account, click Sign In at the top of the page, enter your new developer username and password, and click Sign In.
  2. On the developer page, click Create a Sandbox User.
  3. Follow the 0n-screen instructions to create a user account.

Sandbox locations

Each eBay site has a corresponding sandbox site that is localized to the same language as the eBay site.

EBAY-US (U.S. English)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.com

EBAY-DE (German)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.de

EBAY-ES (Spanish)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.es

EBAY-RU (Russian)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.ru

EBAY-UK (U.K .English)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.co.uk

EBAY-FR (French)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.fr

EBAY-AT (German)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.at

EBAY-IN (U.S. English)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.in

EBAY-CA (CA English)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.ca

EBAY-AU (AU English)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.com.au

EBAY-IT (Italian)

www.mip.sandbox.ebay.it

 

Using the sandbox

eBay recommends that you get started with MIP in the sandbox, and when your feeds are working correctly, then upload them to the production environment on the eBay site.

  1. Upload your feeds to your sandbox area.
  2. Download response feeds and correct any errors.
  3. Verify that the listings are displayed correctly.
  4. Then complete the instructions in the following sections to set up your MIP account and upload your feeds to the eBay site.

Launching MIP

  1. MIP is supported on the sites listed in the following table, which also lists the language of each site. Launch MIP using one of the included URLs.

EBAY-US (U.S. English)

www.mip.ebay.com

EBAY-DE (German)

www.mip.ebay.de

EBAY-ES (Spanish)

www.mip.ebay.es

EBAY-RU (Russian)

www.mip.ebay.ru

EBAY-UK (U.K .English)

www.mip.ebay.co.uk

EBAY-FR (French)

www.mip.ebay.fr

EBAY-AT (German)

www.mip.ebay.at

EBAY-IN (U.S. English)

www.mip.ebay.in

EBAY-CA (CA English)

www.mip.ebay.ca

EBAY-AU (AU English)

www.mip.ebay.com.au

EBAY-IT (Italian)

www.mip.ebay.it

 

  1. If not already logged in, sign in with your eBay seller account and password.
  2. Click Get Started to launch MIP.

Settings

The following sections outline the process for updating your basic MIP account settings.

Setting up channel management

In the navigation pane (left column) select Channel Management. The channel management page displays the settings for your warehouse location and business policies, including policies for payment, shipping, and returns.

Setting your warehouse location

eBay needs to know the location of your warehouse, so that the buyer can see where you are shipping from and to calculate shipping costs.

The default website where you will sell your products is set to EBAY-US. To use only this site:

  1. Click EBAY-US to display the Edit Channel dialog box.
  2. Enter the required information about your warehouse, and click OK to save the information. Then go to the next section, Creating and managing business policies.

To use other sites:

  1. Above Warehouse location, click Add channel. The Add Channel dialog box appears.
  2. Select one channel (other than the EBAY-US site already selected) on which to sell your products.
  3. Enter the rest of the information that is required in the dialog box.
  4. Click OK to save the changes and close the dialog box
  5. Repeat steps 1 - 4 for each channel you want to add.

Creating and managing business policies

Requirements

Creating business policies

Although you set up business policies on the eBay site, you can access the site from MIP to create, edit, and add new business policies, as follows:

  1. If there you have no business policies set up, on the Channel management page, under Shipping policy, Payment policy, or Returns policy, click Create. MIP opens your account page on My eBay (http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/business-policies.html) but leaves the MIP page open as well.
  2. On your My eBay page, follow the instructions to create a Shipping policy, a Payment policy, and/or a Returns policy. The policies are listed on the eBay site but not in MIP. However, you can apply the policies within MIP by including the policy names in the CSV files on the lines for each product. See the examples in the next section.
  1. Close the My eBay window.

Applying business policies

Example 1: Default business policies - partial Product Feed CSV file

SKU

Attribute Value

Category

Shipping

Payment

Return

Condition

CAM-001

Cannon

31388

shipping

payment

return

USED

Example 2: User-created business policies - partial Product Feed CSV file

SKU

Attribute Value

Category

Shipping

Payment

Return

Condition

Notes about this example (this column is not in the CSV file.)

CAM-001

Cannon

31388

US_CamShip01

USpay01

USCamRet01

USED

All policies in this example CSV file are for the US only.

Two shipping policies, one for fully assembled cameras, one for accessories.

One payment policy for camera items. Uses the default payment policy for binoculars.

One return policy for new items and one for used items.

CAM-002

Nikon

31388

US_CamShip01

USpay01

USCamRet02

NEW

LENS-001

Cannon Zoom

78997

US_CamShip02

USpay01

USCamRet02

NEW

LENS-002

Cannon Lens Hood

78999

US_CamShip02

USpay01

USCamRet02

NEW

BIN-001

Cannon Binoculars

28179

US_CamShip02

payment

USCamRet02

NEW

Selecting a standard feed file type and format

You must complete the channel management settings before the Feed schema link becomes active.

  1. In the navigation pane (left column) select Feed Schema, then select one of the feed file formats: eBay or Amazon.
  2. For the feed format you selected, select a feed file type: eBay XML or CSV, or Amazon CSV.
  3. Click Save Changes.

Uploading feeds

Before setting up your feed uploads, lets walk through a small practice product feed upload so that you can see how it works. We'll provide the sample eBay .CSV feed file. All you have to do is click a few times and make a few small changes, then watch it happen.

Downloading a sample feed

  1. Open the following link.
    product-combined.csv – this feed includes details such as title, product identifier, product description, item condition, variation specifics, attributes, and image URLs
  2. Download the sample feed file.

Editing the sample feed

  1. Open the product-combined feed sample file
  2. Compare the information you have about the products you sell with the information in the sample feed, and determine how your product information matches the structure of the product feed file.
  1. Locate the Shipping Policy, Payment Policy, and Return Policy columns in the CSV file. These columns tell eBay the names of your business policies associated with the items listed in the CSV file.
  2. For each SKU in the CSV file, replace the default name with the name of your business policies associated with it. Use lower case. See the example in the first line of the illustration.
  3. For each SKU in the CSV file, set the Total Ship To Home Quantity to 0 (zero) to avoid incurring costs when you upload your practice feed, and so that when the feed goes live, the sample product listing will not appear on eBay. See the example in the first line of the illustration.

Sample CSV file

  1. In the column labeled Channel ID, change EBAY-US to the correct name for your locale (EBAY-DE, etc.), as shown in the first like of the above illustration. See the table at the top of this page for correct names.
  2. Important. Save the file as a CSV file.

Uploading the sample feed

You can use either the MIP user interface or the SFTP server to upload and download feeds. The procedure for the user interface is included here. See Using MIP with sFTP for information about using the SFTP server.

Due to security concerns with Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) and MD5 encryption when using the SFTP server, the following CBC mode ciphers and MD5 MACs have been deprecated. You must check the SSH implementation you are using and confirm that it is not one of the deprecated algorithms listed below.

To avoid service interruptions, please update your ciphers and MACs as soon as possible.

Deprecated Ciphers and MACs
CBC Ciphers   MD5 MACs
aes128-cbc   hmac-md5
aes192-cbc   hmac-md5-96
aes256-cbc   hmac-md5-etm@openssh.com
blowfish-cbc   hmac-sha1-96
3des-cbc   hmac-sha2-256-96
3des-ctr   hmac-sha2-512-96
arcfour    
arcfour128    
arcfour256    

The table below indicates the preferred ciphers and MACs for use with the SFTP server. They are listed in order of preference.

Preferred Ciphers and MACs
CBC Ciphers   MD5 MACs
chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com   hmac-sha2-512-etm@openssh.com
aes256-gcm@openssh.com   hmac-sha2-256-etm@openssh.com
aes128-gcm@openssh.com   hmac-sha2-512
aes256-ctr   hmac-sha2-256
aes192-ctr    
aes128-ctr    

Using the MIP user interface:

  1. In MIP, go to Product.

  2. Click Upload.
  3. In the File Upload dialog box that appears, browse to the CSV file and click Open.
  4. Click Upload. When the file has successfully uploaded, a completion message appears and a response file is listed on the screen.

Using response files

When you upload any of the following feed types to eBay, MIP processes the feed file and then generates a response file that confirms what you uploaded and reports whether MIP successfully processed the information. There are several other feeds and associated response files than those listed here, but in this topic, we’ll keep it simple.

If an error occurs and the upload is not successful, MIP generates an error message that includes detailed information about the error and what caused it. Users then know how to fix their upload feeds, and can successfully upload them again.

Response files are in the same format as the feed you upload. That is, if your feed is a CSV file, the response for that feed is also CSV, and if your feed is XML, the response file for that feed will also be XML.

CSV responses all have an identical structure. XML responses have a summary section.

Obtaining a response file

You can download response files either with the MIP user interface or use FTP with the file server.

To download response files with the MIP user interface:

  1. Under Feed archive, select the feel type of response file you want to download, and then select the navigation button. For example, to get the product feed response file, click Product, and then, in the Results file column, click Download .
  2. When prompted, either click Open to review the file in a browser or click Save to download the file to your computer.

To download response files from the MIP file server:

  1. Open the Output folder in the feed folder. For example, open the Product folder, then open the Output folder.
  2. In the Output folder, locate the subfolder labeled with the time-stamp that correlates to the time when you uploaded the feed file.
  3. Open that folder to obtain the response file for the that upload. Use the FTP client to download the response file to your computer.

When to use a response file

eBay recommends that you download the response files after each upload to make sure that your listings are complete and displayed as intended.

Contents of a response file

Response files contain these elements: