I'm kind of new with the eBay API. I found two methods to get item information:
Trading API has GetItem method
Shopping API has GetSingleItem method
So, what is the main difference between these two APIs?
I need to search items in eBay through my website, I'm making it with the findingItemsAdvance. I also need to get the weight and item dimensions in order to calculate the right price, but the findingItems doesn't provide it.
The eBay's team advice is use the Trading API, but I don't understand the main difference between the two APIs. Thank you.
This is a two part question. Part 1 is, what is the difference between the two calls. Part 2 is, what is the difference between the Trading and Shopping API.
Lets start with Part 2 first.
The Trading API is the "full featured" API. It can do just about everything you would want to do with eBay. Because the Trading API can do everything, it is longer, and to an extent, more unwieldy. (Edit: The trading API can't do everything, it is limited to your user only)
The Shopping API is not your general purpose eBay toolkit. It is focused, it provides Shopping related functionality and that is it. Thus the calls are generally simpler and easier to work with.
Moving back to Part 1, we can see an excellent example of this.
The Trading API's getItem call has a output listing that clocks in at 739 lines.
The Shopping API's getSingleItem call has an output listing that clocks in at 242 lines.
This is an example of the increased strength and complexity that the Trading API offers. The Trading API is the better all around choice, while the Shopping API is good for well, a "Shopping" related app.
Related
I have a mobile app that allows people to upload information of clothes they have and share it with their friends. I have good traction - increasingly more users every day.
I want to create a new feature that allows users to sell unwanted items on eBay. Ideally, they'll click a button and the item will be available for sale on eBay.
I went through the developer APIs and I'm not even sure where to start. I can't tell whether I should try Retail-Standard Selling (New Sell APIs) or Traditional eBay Selling (Trading APIs) or even something else. Please could someone point me in the right direction?
Since we're speaking of unique items I would suggest to use "old" trading API AddFixedPriceItem
that's made for garage-sale and can do everything with just one call. (1)
while new Sell APIs are meant for stores selling new items in multiple quantities
and requires several calls to achieve the same result (create depo, images, listing, offer...)
BUT
despite what eBay writes (that will continue to support Trading APIs)
we see that every month some Trading APIs are decommissioned or deprecated:
for example last January they removed GetCategorySpecifics
and for next April there will be others..
Clearly you could mix the APIs, using the best combination of both
but since you're at beginning and since the 2 API family are completely different, I suggest you to use new Sell APIs
(1) Just to create the Listing, then several other are required to find proper category, itemsSpecifics, creating the profiles.... and so on..
I have been looking online and saw many similar/same posts but all were extremely old (latest I found was from 2011) so since technology changes, I thought I ask too.
I wonder how a flight comparison website (where you cannot book flights and can only be redirected to other websites) get their data.
Is it all by now through api's or is it throgh scrapping data (which would be not so reliable)? Ive been reading online, trying to find out if thats the case but it doesnt really seem that EVERY airline and EVERY flight search website (with booking option) provides an api. So I wonder how sites like Kayak get their data if not every airline/every flight booking website provides an api?
Also, I came across some api's like
QPX Express API
skyscanner travel api (which I checked out on some website which is using it and it does seem that data is quite limited ?!)
Travelport api
Amadeus API
Sabre travel api
Wego Affiliate Network (which seems really great but search takes super long)
I wonder if anyone has experience with the mentioned api's and how good their are /if using them is 'the way' of doing it or if its actually much more realiable to request data directly from each airline and booking website (if thats possible)?
Thanks a lot!
If we take Kayak as the example, as that is who you mentioned, they approach the data in two forms.
They have API PULL connections to GDS companies (i.e. Sabre), some airlines and large online travel companies such as Expedia etc.
Smaller airlines in particular PUSH their inventory and fares from their inventory to companies such as Kayak.
Aggregation companies generally provide PUSH access though companies who want to PUSH their data have to comply with the aggregators requirements/standards.
It is a supply and demand service. Aggregation companies will generally request access to large established companies, however, will also allow companies to push their data to them if they wish.
The data is not normally scrapped, it is through API and web service platforms.
Is it possible to retrieve shipping quotes on the fly through an external API when a user purchases something through my eBay store?
eBay (and previously PayPal) does not expose the shipping quotes API for various reasons (including technical, business, and pricing reasons) so the short answer is "no, there is no way". In fact it gets the quotes from an external (independent) source.
You can try integrating with Pitney Bowes or a similar provider to get the shipping quotes but that solution is for large players.
UPDATE: Since your company is the one hosting the quote service...
When a user purchaes an item on ebay a "purchase notification" is sent out to a merchant. There are a few different versions of it which you can read about on eBay's dev site. One of them is ItemSold Notification that you can use.
UPDATE 2:
If I understand you correctly you are trying to inject some business logic into eBay's purchasing UI? I'm afraid you are out of luck here. You have limited (pretty much none) influence on the eBay's web flow.
Implementing Paypal for a UK based NGO where they are selling certain services plus accepting donations.
I am using REST API for selling services which is working well but do we use the same API for Donation as well. I would like to handle Gift Aids as well. I dont see any payment type option within the API.
If I use the standard Donation button, how do I get the transaction Id and other values back so that I can save them in my system.
There is no real technical difference between donations and payments for goods and services. (The donations button is just a few cosmetic differences on top of a regular website payments standard or EC payment experience.) The REST is not yet as feature rich as the older payment flows and may not have those same cosmetic tweaks available, but you can definitely use either the REST or the classic API for both services and donations.
I would recommend not using both REST and classic together on your site; you will encounter many annoyances due to differences in the underlying models. It is not just the initial payment integration that is different; the payment IDs are different, the APIs you can use to manage the payment lifecycle are different etc.
As one such example, to answer your question #2 you cannot get REST-style payment IDs for non-REST transactions. You get back classic transaction IDs in the payment redirect or the DoEC API response, depending upon which integration you use. You also get classic payment IDs if you integrate IPNs (whereas with REST you would integrate webhooks... the differences keep coming!).
IS there any way I could retrieve all the reviews of a business Using the API ?
The sample response here just shows 3
http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v2/business
In v3 yelp has a reviews API and it returns only three reviews per business.
Yelp Business Reviews v3
Unfortunately, yelp restricts reviews access via APIs. With the V2.0, it is restricted to just one review snippet, which is also truncated after 40 chars.
An alternate that you could try is to use web scraping platforms such as scrapy. Again, the challenge here is that, yelp changes its layout pretty often just to make sure you don't scrape out their data and hence, your scripts will likely fail after sometime.