Developer Impact: Duplicate Listing Policy

Yesterday, Dinesh Lathi announced a new Duplicate Listing policy on eBay (US, CA, CAFR) and eBay Motors. Starting October 26, a seller’s duplicate listings may be removed unless they are "significantly different in buyer benefit and value from items offered in their other Fixed Price listings." This policy does not apply to auction format.

Developers may want to consolidate listings for their sellers. The easiest thing to do is take duplicate single-quantity listings, increase the quantity of one listing, and end the other listings. If the other listings are ended on Oct 26, insertion fees will be credited.

Duplicate listings can also be consolidated into multi-variation listings, or fitment listings (in Motors P&A). It is not possible to directly convert the format, so the original duplicate listings will need to be ended, and the consolidated item listed as a new multi-variation or fitment listing.

Sellers who continue to create duplicate listings may be subject to a range of additional actions including "listing cancellation, loss of fees, limits on account privileges, loss of seller status, and account suspension." Developers will want to make sure that they consolidate seller listings to avoid subjecting their sellers to penalties.

For more details on this new policy, including example duplicate listings, see:

• Duplicate Listing Policy

Also see,

• Interview with Todd Lutwak on the updates

Site Maintenance Scheduled for 9/30

Just a heads up that the eBay Developers Program website will be unavailable because of the scheduled system maintenance happening between 3pm (PT) to midnight, on Thursday, September 30th. In addition, parts of the sandbox site that are dependent on the Developer Program website will also be unavailable at that time.
For most website content and tools, please check back after this timeframe.

During this maintenance timeframe, the following resources will be available:

eBay Developers Program Knowledge Base
eBay Developers Program Sandbox
eBay Developers Program System Announcements for Trading, Open eBay, Client Alerts
eBay Developers Program System Announcements for Shopping, Finding, Merchandising
Documentation
Urgent technical issues

687 Trading and Shopping API Docs Now Available

Please remember to use a test environment when updating applications to use a new schema version.

To find out when a version of the API will be available, see the table at the top of the Release Notes for that API.

You can find the latest API documentation at the eBay Developer Documentation Center.

Default Accept/Reject URLs in User Token Flow are Changing

As of the end of September 23, the default Accept/Reject URLs used in the User-Token generation flow will change. Accept/Reject URLs indicate where the user should go after they consent to, or cancel User-Token generation. eBay provides default values, or you can create your own.

In most cases, changing the default Accept/Reject URL values should not impact your application. If you have hard-coded the original default URLs in your application, you may no longer be able to generate new User Tokens.

As a general best practice, we recommend not hard-coding values in your application that you can get programmatically.

These are the deprecated URLs:

Deprecated Accept URL:https://arribada.ebay.com/aw-secure/auth_auth_thanks.html
Deprecated Reject URL:https://arribada.ebay.com/aw-secure/auth_auth_cancel.html

These are the new URLs:

New Accept URL:https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ThirdPartyAuthSucessFailure&isAuthSuccessful=true
New Reject URL:https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ThirdPartyAuthSucessFailure

This applies only to APIs that require tokens like the Trading API, and only if you've hard-coded the original values. Users of non-token APIs like the Finding API will not need to make changes.

For more information, check out our guidelines on using tokens: Getting Tokens for Applications with Multiple Users.