Blog

We’re introducing size standardization for Apparel & Footwear listings on eBay — a step toward improving listing quality, buyer trust, and overall marketplace performance.

Starting early May, API users will be requested to provide condition grading information when creating or revising listings in the categories above. Listings or revisions that do not include this information will be blocked, hidden or fail to publish.

eBay's Category Aspects metadata, which has given definition to our marketplace listings, is evolving at a fast pace. With these rapid enhancements, a consequent challenge of keeping this metadata in sync and gaining quick insights into what might have changed is of increasing importance to our developer community.

eBay is a truly global marketplace with 174M buyers in 190 markets. So, our primary goal is to connect buyers and sellers around the world. It is crucial to our seller community to cross the language barrier and amplify reach. Machine translation is one of the key contributors to promoting cross-border trade on eBay. It is a considerable remover of friction.

Use new Media API and Trading API to enhance listings with videos.

eBay requires sellers to specify the item location when they list an item. Although sellers can specify item location as either a valid postal code or as a free-text string identifying the location, sellers should use postal code to specify item location, whenever possible.

eBay announced changes to the way taxes are processed in situations where eBay collects and remits taxes on behalf of sellers. eBay is responsible for collecting and remitting internet sales tax (IST) for many US states and also collects and remits goods and services taxes (GST) in Australia and New Zealand.

There are corresponding API changes to address this new behavior.

eBay releases the Negotiation API, which lets sellers send discount offers to the buyers who have shown an interest in the seller's listings.

Starting on October 1, 2019, the eBay Finding API will work over HTTPS only. Any requests submitted via HTTP will fail. The requirement to use HTTPS only will apply to both sandbox and production environments. Both environments support HTTPS currently.

At eBay Connect last summer, we announced that OpenAPI documents are available for all our RESTful APIs. We demonstrated that integration with read-only capabilities takes a few minutes. OAuth client libraries work very well when used alongside API clients generated from the OpenAPI documents.

Our SDKs are open-sourced and provide a full transparency to developers into what is happening in their integrations.

The eBay Developers Program has updated the eBay API License Agreement. The focus of this update is improved security, especially with regard to data protection and eBay member privacy concerns.

On August 14, 2018, we announced that we are leveraging the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) for all of our RESTful public APIs. The APIs are described using both 2.0 and 3.0 versions of the OAS. With OpenAPI, developers can download an eBay OpenAPI contract, generate clients in one of 40+ supported programming languages, and successfully invoke an eBay API in minutes.

As announced in the 2018 Spring and Summer Seller Updates, eBay is simplifying and streamlining returns on eBay. To help developers verify that you’re ready for these changes, we have summarized the API changes, timelines, and best practices in our API docs and developer news.

Per the recent Watermark Removal Policy Enforcement Update, eBay has decided that we will not enforce the removal of watermarks by March 2018 as originally planned. Thank you for taking the time contact us to explain the challenges you and/or your customers faced with the original timing. We know that the holidays are a crucial time of year, and we want you to be able to focus completely on selling right now.

The Fulfillment API now supports eBay Guaranteed Delivery and the eBay Global Shipping Program, plus OpenAPI specs.

In August 2017, we officially became a part of the Open API Initiative (OAI). We continue on the path of progress by being one of the first in the industry to publish contracts based on OpenAPI 3.0 specification. They are available now for all our RESTful APIs under the Buy and Commerce umbrella while Sell APIs are coming soon.

As we continue to invest in our eBay developer community and in making our API offerings richer, we are excited to announce the launch of two new methods in the Buy Marketing API suite:

• getAlsoViewedByProduct
• getAlsoBoughtByProduct

eBay's Inventory API now enables sellers to publish offers with variations, determine which offers are part of a variation group, and unpublish or withdraw product offers (to end listings).