I have thousands of items and multiple eBay accounts.
They are mostly variation items with differing prices per color and size variation.
What's the best way to bulk list all the items?
Previously, I had everything listed one at a time, using either the addItem or addVariationItem calls.
But that can't be how large sellers manage things if in my situation.
What is the preferred way, the eBay API of choice, that best accomplishes this task?
Likewise, for updating the price and stock for all SKUs multiple times per day?
Is there a one-shot call or upload way which can do this?
There are some Bulky options with eBay APIs, but if you need to make more than 5000 calls per day you need first to build an App and pass eBay verification, and since 1 item means at least 1 call...
Elsewhere you have to use some SaaS services.
If you've already passed such step you can search for what was the LMS services. Actually they've been decommissioned last weekend but there is the new version (that's not working properly but we hope it will do soon). I suggest you to follow the migration procedure. It is not very clear, as all the eBay documentation, but IMHO is the best path.
Related
I have am trying to make a tool to manage inventory levels between my warehouse system and my bigcommerce store. The issue I am running into is the Bigcommerce only sets inventory levels based on the Ids/Variant Ids. My warehouse software only knows products by sku/subsku.
The first step in the process is getting the ids and variant ids and storing them for current use and later usage.
I do this by calling "catalog/products" and getting all the products for the catalog through a series of calls to build a complete list. I loop through and then do the same for the variants "catalog/products/{0}/variants"
With this list I match my skus and variants to the catalog list returned. Update the matching skus to big commerce id/variant ids for future and then finally I begin the process of actually updating inventory levels.
I then begin updating the product by calling the endpoint "catalog/products/{id}"
or
"catalog/products/{id}/variants/{variantId}"
This process takes way too long even for a few quantity level updates. Is there a better way?
I have also noticed that sometimes the big commerce ids will change for some skus. Which require a complete resync.
Are there better endpoints to use? Is there a way to update an item based on the sku not the id/variantid?
My solution is in C# but code is not the problem. The problem is what to call and if there is a better way to call the endpoints.
One area I see an opportunity to streamline the API calls is here:
I do this by calling "catalog/products" and getting all the products
for the catalog through a series of calls to build a complete list. I
loop through and then do the same for the variants
"catalog/products/{0}/variants"
You can get products along with their variants by including variants as a subresource using the ?include= param. For example:
catalog/products?include=variants
There would still need to be some kind of mapping from variantID to SKU, but when it comes to pushing the updated inventory to BigCommerce, we're also close to releasing updates that will allow you to batch update up to 50 products or variants in a single call. Keep an eye on our Changelog for that announcement: https://developer.bigcommerce.com/changelog
I am using the Bigcommerce API to develop a small standalone application for a client. I store product information in a local database anytime I fetch products from Bigcommerce, to reduce latency and network load. However, products can change on Bigcommerce, and while it is acceptable for my application to show mildly outdated information, I will need to update my local cache at some point. My current plan is to do this by storing the original date I requested the product, after which I will need to perform another request to refresh the cache.
My question is, given a list of products (including their Bigcommerce IDs), is there a way to request updates to all of them through a single call to the Products Resource? I can make a request for each individual product by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products/{id}
I can also request all products within an unbroken ID range by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products?min_id={value}&max_id={value}
I am able to successfully call both of the above methods, and I can chain them together in loops to fetch all products. What I want to do is request multiple products with unrelated IDs in a single call. So, something like this:
//THIS IS NOT A REAL METHOD!
GET {api}/v2/products?id[]={value1}&id[]={value2}
Is there any way I can do this? Or is there another approach to solving this that I haven't considered? My main requirements are:
Minimal API requests. My application is small but my client's bigcommerce store is not, and I will be processing tens of thousands of products. I have limited CPU and network resources available, and I simply cannot process that many requests.
Scalable. As I said, my client's store is large, and growing. I need a solution whose overhead scales at a manageable rate with number of products.
Note: my application is a small web application written in PHP running on a Linux shared hosting environment. It is a back of house system which will likely only be used by single user at a time, during standard business hours. I haven't tagged the question with PHP because my question is about the API, which is language agnostic.
One approch can be.
First get all products from BigCommerce using simple products call.
Set some interval time to get updated product list.
You can use min_date_modified and max_date_modified OR min_date_created and max_date_created in products API call to get updated products details.
I am building a system that publishes products from our inventory to our eBay seller account. Everything is working fine, but I just keep thinking which call should I use when I update the quantity in our inventory.
RelistFixedPriceItem and AddFixedPriceItem both are working well, except that on eBay I will have same item with two different itemID, one is sold and one is active...
is that ok? Does it have something to do with eBay listing terms?
Any Advice?
Thanks
AddFixedPriceItem creates a new listing that does not include any data regarding the previous listing's statistics or sales data. RelistFixedPriceItem will create a listing for the product that does include the sales data from the original listing.
The eBay best match search engine uses a listing's sales stats as part of its algorithm to determine search standing. So if your original listing had a good number of views or sales, I would definitely recommend using ReslistFixedPriceItem. However, if your previous listings was stagnant for a long time without many views or sales, it might be more advantageous to use AddFixedPriceItem instead to give the listing a clean slate.
eBay is always changing their search algorithms, so there is no hard and fast rule here. You really just have to find out what works best for your particular products. Experimentation is key.
I have to integrate my webshop with an external system. This system provides several functionalities, described in their API. This is what I want to do:
Import/sync products (this is available as CSV via request)
Update stock of products (also available as webrequest)
So I have to hook into the Magento stock check and I want some script which updates the products like everyday.
Where should I implement my changes? What is the best way to do this? I can imagine Magento already have some API stock functionalities, but can`t seem to find the right documentation.
Thanks in advance!
Firstly you could use the Magento web service via either SOAP and XML-RPC:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/introduction.html#Introduction-SOAP
There's an API for updating stock levels:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/catalogInventory/cataloginventory_stock_item.update.html
However, this is usually quite slow and can take some time to update large collections of products, in which case you are better going for a solution which uses the Magento object model directly, or something custom.
Depending upon your level of development expertise there's a few options available. One library to checkout is Magmi:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/magmi/index.php?title=Magmi_Wiki
this is useful for updating lots of product data / stock levels quite quickly.
If you do no require an automated solution, you could always use the standard Magento import/export profiles to import stock levels from a CSV file, a quick search for 'Magento Import Export Profiles' should give you a good starting place:
http://www.seenbest-web-design.com/techclub/importing-a-csv-of-products-to-magento/
http://www.woolleydesign.net/2011/02/updating-store-inventory-in-magento/
I am fully functionally using Magmi now. I have written a plugin to automatically create configurable products, so if anyone is ever interested let me know.
There is already a plugin to process configurable products, my plugin is dependent on that plugin.
Basically, you will only be able to create configurable products if you especially have added this to your CSV, with a column named 'type'. In the column type you can set simple or configurable. With my module that won`t be nessecary. By some logic I automatically recognize the simple products and create a new configurable containing those products.
A little explanation on why I need this:
The stock system of our client updates a list of product (CSV) every few hours, containing entries of products. They sell clothing, and every size, and every color is a new entry. So one product can have 10 entries, entry 1: t-shirt green, size 12; entry 2: t-shirt green, size 13, etc.
I explain this, just in case anybody would ever need something like this, my plugin will probably help you. It will although need a few modification for your situation, since this is very specific to how your list of products is composed.
Anyway, thanks for your help!
My scenario: I have a client with an eBay store with custom categories. On their website, they would like to list the items they have for sale. They would like this list to be filterable by custom category.
I've been searching for a couple days now, and I'm still a bit unsure about the best way to proceed.
From what I can gather, the only way to get a list of categories defined in a store is through the GetStore call in the Trading API. This seems to be supported, though I need to get a user token from my client's eBay account. I will assume this works.
I do not, however, see any method of filtering items based on custom categories. I've looked through the documentation of both the Trading and Finding APIs, but all I see are filters on pre-defined eBay categories.
Is it possible to filter on custom/store categories?
I had a task to link seller products to custom categories and the only way I found is to retrieve a list of custom categories with "GetStore" from Trading API, retrieve all seller items with "findItemsAdvanced" call form Finding API, and loop through all retrieved items and get details with "GetItem" call from Trading API.
After that I could find custom categories under $xml->Item->Storefront->StoreCategoryID and $xml->Item->Storefront->StoreCategory2ID.
After digging through and posting in the eBay forums, I found out that no, it is not possible to filter on custom/store defined categories via the API. The only way to filter on custom/store defined categories is on the eBay hosted store.
This is apparently eBay's way to make the store hosted on their site more feature rich than anything you can do via the API.
Even though this question is old, I believe it interesting to give a more recent answer. As stated above, you cannot directly filter items sold by a store using custom store categories (StoreCategoryID). The easiest way to work around this is using the GetSellerList API using a coarse granularity level, which allows you to get the storeCategoryID of each Item on sale within a starting time range or an end time range. You can then filter the items yourself. Here's a link to a forum answer: https://ebay.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1178
Yes no way to get items by Custom categories.
It sounds like either getCategoryInfo or GetCategories might help you.