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The Negotiation API is a new eBay capability that enables sellers to initiate and manage negotiations. This launch will give sellers the ability to make an offer to buyers who have shown interest in a specific eBay listing. However, the scope of Negotiation API is to enable all the negotiation capabilities provided by eBay.

While the ultimate goal of the Offer to Buyers is to increase the velocity of sales and also help sellers move stagnant inventory, the ability to contact interested buyers can also help to increase the visibility of a seller's inventory as they reach out to them with a discount offer.

In short, the ability for sellers to send offers to buyers creates more opportunities for ecommerce engagement within the community of eBay buyers and sellers.

The idea behind Offer to Buyers

Buyers express true interest in an eBay listing in many ways, including placing a Watch on the listing or adding the listing to their shopping cart. With the Offers to Buyers, you can (1) determine which of your listings have eligible interested buyers and (2) create and send an exclusive discount offer with a message to the eligible buyers who have demonstrated interest in a specific listing.

Buyers who receive seller offers get an instant push notification on their mobile devices and desktop computers, and from there they can accept the offer to purchase the item at the discounted price.

What the buyer sees

The following two screen shots, from the eBay iOS mobile app, show the notification that is sent to the buyer, then the offer that's extended to the buyer when they click into the offer:

Offer notification from Seller    Offer detail from Seller

Getting it done with the Negotiation API

The Negotiation API has been added to the Sell context of the eBay RESTful APIs. However, you can use the capabilities of the API with listing IDs created with the Trading API, as well as with your listings managed with the Inventory API (the Negotiations API uses listing ID values created by any eBay flow).

The planned scope of Negotiation API encompasses all of the negotiation capabilities provided by eBay. While this release of the API starts with Offers to Buyers, we plan to quickly follow this initial API release with capabilities that include the features found in the Best Offer functionality currently available with the Trading APIs. Specifically, we will be adding the ability for buyers to enter into a negotiation with the seller by letting buyers name the price they would like to pay for a specific listing.

For more details on the the API, please see the following page on Send Offers to Buyers.

Negotiation API capabilities

There are two main features to the Offers to Buyers capability added to the Negotiation API:

  1. Determining which listings within all the active listings in a seller’s stock has at least one eligible interested buyer.
  2. Sending a discount offer with a private message to all the buyers who are eligible to receive offers from the seller for a specific listing.

In another way, you first discover the listings that are eligible for the Send Offer to Buyers functionality, then you select which of those listings you want to create and send a discount offer with a private message to all eligible buyers associated with the listing.

How to get started with the Negotiation API

This initial release of the Negotiation API provides two endpoints:

  • get_eligible_items
  • send_offer_to_interested_buyers

For complete details on these methods, including sample requests and responses, see the Negotiation API Reference.

To check out and test the Negotiation API, log into the eBay Developers Program and navigate to the API Explorer (see the Using eBay RESTful APIs for details on how to use the API Explorer).