Great Demo of the eBay Selling Team's New Listing APIs

In the Day 2 Bulk Editing and Relisting session, Scot Hamilton and Paul Henry from eBay's Seller Platform talked about new selling APIs they're working on.

They showed a demo of the new bulk editing tool on eBay, and they ran various live API requests to demonstrate how the new logic works and what you'll see in the API response.

Here are just a few of the useful features you'll get when these APIs roll out in 2011:

Context-Sensitive Dependencies and Metadata
You can submit a draft listing with a title, category, and other data you know. In the response, eBay returns details like the item condition options that the category supports. (No need to call GetCategoryFeatures ahead of time.)

Or suppose you decide to add Best Offer to a listing. You submit a modified draft, and eBay returns dependent fields (such as the best offer auto-accept price). So, again, you don't need to check in advance whether the category supports auto-accept. Later, if you remove Best Offer, eBay removes the dependent fields for you and tells you what changed.

Depending on your use case, you might never need to code field dependencies or cache site- or category-specific metadata yourself at all!

Fee Calculations
The new APIs are expected to offer the same real-time, detailed fee calculations that you see in eBay's bulk editing tool. If you make changes to a draft listing, the fees are recalculated as well.

View Item Preview URL
These APIs will offer a View Item preview URL in case the seller wants to see what an listing will look like on eBay before the listing goes live.

Bulk Changes Across a Set of Listings
In addition to supporting many listings in a single request, the APIs will enable you to apply homogeneous edits across a set of listings or templates. For example, you can say that field A should be X% higher than field B across all the specified listings.

You can also get the total fees across a set of listings.

Keep an eye on the Developers Program blog for more information about the new APIs in the future!