Release Note: REGULATORY_GUIDELINE Notification Topic

What This Topic Does

eBay's REGULATORY_GUIDELINE notification topic delivers eBay regulatory communications — such as PPWR (Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation) requirements, CPSC compliance requirements, and GPSR product safety disclosures — directly to your platform via the eBay Notification API.

When a new regulatory guideline is published or updated, your subscribed endpoint receives a push notification containing:

• Seller-facing content: headline, full description, action required summary, compliance deadline, consequence of inaction, and links to official regulatory resources — in up to 16 languages
• Developer-facing content: optional heads-up on new eBay APIs or platform changes that may help your sellers comply (e.g., Media API support for certificate uploads)

Your platform receives the content; your team decides how to display it to sellers.

Who This Is For

This topic is designed for third-party eBay partner platforms and sellers' in-house built ERP systems — selling tools, listing managers, and multi-channel commerce apps — that already integrate with the eBay Notification API and serve eBay sellers.

If your platform is a daily working environment for eBay sellers, this topic enables you to surface compliance information where sellers already operate, rather than relying on sellers to find it in eBay email or Seller Hub.

No whitelist is required. Any partner with an eBay Developer account can subscribe.

Key FAQs

1. How does versioning work, and can the same guideline arrive more than once?

Yes. Each guideline has a persistent regulationGuidelineId. When eBay updates a guideline — for example, adding translated content or revising a deadline — the same ID is reused with an incremented version number, and a new notification event is sent.

The unique key is regulationGuidelineId + version. For each regulationGuidelineId, store only the highest version. Drop any incoming event whose version is equal to or lower than what you already have.

Example:

• Version 1 — developer-facing (3PP) content only; no seller-facing content yet. Acts as a heads-up to give you lead time before sellers need to act.
• Version 2 — same, plus English and German seller-facing content. Begin showing to sellers.
• Version 3 — adds Japanese and Chinese translations. Replace v2; display the latest.

If the exact same regulationGuidelineId + version arrives more than once, drop the duplicate after the first receipt.

2. Should I subscribe once per app, or per seller like other notification topics?

Subscribe once per app ID — not per seller.

Regulatory guideline notifications are platform-level, not seller-level. One subscription delivers one notification event that applies to your entire seller base. Save it to your database and display it to all relevant sellers.

This is a fundamental difference from seller-specific topics like order updates or seller metrics, where each event maps to a single seller.

3. Which events should I display to sellers? How do I filter out test data?

Display only records where both conditions are true:

Field	Required value
status	active
regulationType	Regulatory Guideline

The regulationType field has exactly two possible values:

Value	Meaning
"eBay internal test"	Test data — do not display to sellers. All field values (titles, URLs, descriptions) are fake.
"Regulatory Guideline"	Real, eBay-approved content — display to sellers.

4. What text format do content fields use?

Fields such as description and userActionRequiredDescription use markdown-formatted text. There is no HTML in this topic — do not attempt to render HTML tags. Use a markdown renderer in your seller-facing UI.

Note: this is specific to REGULATORY_GUIDELINE. Other eBay notification topics may use different formats — check their individual documentation.

5. How do I determine which sellers to show a notification to?

For Phase 1, showing the notification to all sellers on your platform is acceptable.

If you have seller location or shipping destination data, the payload includes two optional targeting fields:

Field	Use for
shippingDestinations	Filter by where sellers ship to — most reliable signal for regulatory applicability
userLocations	Filter by seller's registered location

Regulations like CPSC apply based on shipping destination, not listing marketplace. A seller listing on eBay Australia who ships to the US still needs to comply. If you don't have precise destination data per seller, broad display is the right default for Phase 1.

6. How long should I display a notification? What if multiple guidelines are active at once?

Display timing: Use recommendedNotificationStartDate and recommendedNotificationEndDate from the payload — do not hardcode date ranges. After recommendedNotificationEndDate, archive the notification (do not delete it); sellers who missed it should still be able to find it on demand.

Priority when multiple guidelines are active simultaneously:

Priority	Criteria
1st	userActionRequired = true
2nd	Closer effectiveDate (sooner compliance deadline)
3rd	Closer recommendedNotificationEndDate

7. How often will I receive events?

Each active guideline is pushed to your endpoint every 30 minutes, continuously. This is by design — it ensures delivery even if your endpoint was temporarily unavailable, and is why the deduplication logic in Q1 is required.

eBay publishes approximately one new guideline per week. Size your processing pipeline accordingly: steady-state is one active guideline pulsing every 30 minutes, with occasional overlap when a new guideline is published before the previous one's display window closes.