Publish Offers, Ship Orders And Print Shipping Labels With eBay

You sell on eBay, and the selling part is fine. It is everything around it that eats the week: keying the same listing in for the third time, marking orders shipped one by one, buying labels, and keeping the return policy on every listing in step with the one on your website. If your inventory already lives in a spreadsheet, a point-of-sale system or an online store, all of that can be done for you. eBay exposes its selling tools through an API, which is a way for one piece of software to talk to another, so your existing systems, a script, or an AI assistant can publish, ship and reconcile on your behalf.

What eBay does

eBay is a multinational e-commerce corporation that operates a website facilitating consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its online platform. Users can buy and sell a wide range of products, including electronics, fashion, collectibles, and more, in an auction-style or buy-it-now format. On APIs.io we track 25 separate APIs under the eBay name, each one covering a narrow slice of the marketplace: the Category Tree, Bidding, Custom Policy and Destination APIs among them.

What you can get done

We have mapped eBay’s operations to 13 business capabilities. These are the five a seller will reach for first.

Marketplace Seller Operations Management

An offer on eBay is the thing a buyer sees: an item from your inventory, with a price, a quantity and the marketplace it is published to. Creating offers through the API is how a catalogue of hundreds of products gets onto eBay without anyone retyping it. There are 12 operations here.

• POST /offer creates an offer for one inventory item, with its price, listing format and policies.
• POST /bulk_create_offer creates many offers in one call, which is the one you want for a full catalogue.
• POST /bulk_publish_offer publishes a batch of offers so they go live as listings.
• GET /offer lists the offers you already have, so you can see what is published and what is still a draft.
• PUT /offer/{offerId} updates an existing offer, for example to change a price across the board.

Order Fulfilment Management

Once an order comes in, the buyer wants to know it has shipped. A fulfilment is eBay’s record of that: the carrier, the tracking number and the items in the box. Fulfilment policies are the reusable rules about handling time and shipping options that you attach to listings. Twelve operations cover both.

• POST /order/{orderId}/shipping_fulfillment marks an order as shipped, with the tracking number, so the buyer is told automatically.
• GET /order/{orderId}/shipping_fulfillment lists the fulfilments already recorded against an order.
• POST /fulfillment_policy/ creates a reusable shipping and handling policy.
• PUT /fulfillment_policy/{fulfillmentPolicyId} changes one, which then flows through to every listing using it.
• GET /fulfillment_policy lists the policies you have so you know which to attach where.

Logistics Operations Management

This is the shipping label itself. You ask for a quote across carriers, pick one, and download a label to print, all from the same system that just marked the order shipped.

• POST /shipping_quote asks for shipping rates for a package going to a buyer.
• GET /shipping_quote/{shippingQuoteId} reads the quote back, with the carrier options it returned.
• POST /shipment/create_from_shipping_quote buys the label against one of those options.
• GET /shipment/{shipmentId}/download_label_file downloads the label file to print.
• POST /shipment/{shipmentId}/cancel cancels a shipment you created by mistake.

Item Master Data Management

Every listing has to sit in an eBay category, and each category expects certain details, which eBay calls aspects, such as brand, size or colour. Getting those right is what makes a listing findable. These operations let software look up the category and its required details before it creates the offer.

• GET /get_default_category_tree_id finds the category tree for a marketplace, since the UK and US trees differ.
• GET /category_tree/{category_tree_id}/get_category_suggestions suggests categories from a plain description of the item.
• GET /category_tree/{category_tree_id}/get_item_aspects_for_category tells you which details a category requires.
• GET /product/{epid} reads an eBay catalogue product, so you can list against an existing product record.

Post-Purchase

Return policies are the rules you promise buyers about returns, and like fulfilment policies they are reusable across listings.

• POST /return_policy creates a return policy.
• GET /return_policy lists the ones you have.
• PUT /return_policy/{return_policy_id} changes a policy everywhere it is used.
• GET /return_policy/get_by_policy_name finds a policy by the name you gave it.

Getting started

eBay’s API is a paid, self-serve product, meaning you sign up for a developer account yourself and start building. The documentation is split by area, and the seller-facing parts are the ones above: the Account API overview covers policies, and the Analytics API overview covers seller performance. I could not find Arazzo workflows or conversational phrasing overlays for eBay on APIs.io yet, so for now the operations are the map. On APIs.io you can browse the eBay profile, the Category Tree API, the Deal Item API and the Destination API. Start with whichever of the three chores, listing, shipping or labels, your team does by hand most often, and have that one done for you first.