Ebay Addon State

Hi all,

I know - old news, but I am struggling with the eBay addon.

We purchased it a couple years ago and thought we might start using it. But too many issues with some product features containing more than 65 characters and it appears that the incorrect request is being made to the current eBay API with missing field types, but no ability to set the field type in the eBay template settings - PackageType is the one that is currently giving me grief.

Does anyone know what the current state of play is for the eBay addon and whether it was updated in later versions? We are currently running 4.9.3, and I will be upgrading to the latest in the near future.

Cheers...

So I had a quick play with the addon last night and I think as far as a basic export from CS-CART to eBay goes, I think it will be ok.

In defense of CS-CART here, the development experience with eBay sucks (so far). Even trying to link an ebay sandbox account with a paypal sandbox account is broken. It looks like the current process is to hop on the developer forums and ask for a manual linkage. Pretty poor from such a big company.

One issue I found is that eBay only allows a max of 45 product features. Some of our products have more than this, so I have added a column to the product features table (controllable in CS-CART backend) to determine which product features will be exported to eBay. This is also handy as we have some wordy product features that break the 65 character limit for ebay that we can also exclude.

Even just looking around google, it appears that the character count limit for ebay is constantly changing, once it was 80, now it is 65.

Other than that, it appears to be working ok.

Some features I could think of adding to the addon would be:

- Retrieve custom categories for ebay stores (business account)

- Retrieve custom shipping rate type so we can select that (we have a shipping rate table in ebay)

Without this, it appears that we will need to export products from eBay and then manually assign custom shipping in ebay per product.

It appears that the original CS-CART addon is still using eBay XML apis, which still work for the operations that CS-CART is using, but some of the new operations are only supported using Rest and OAuth.

So depending on what ebay apis you plan on connecting to, you will need to add oauth to the addon to get this working.

Google searching for eBay APIs can be troublesome as their documentation isn't always clear on what is being deprecated.

For example, I want to get our custom shipping policies from ebay (now called fulfillments) using this API:

https://developer.ebay.com/devzone/business-policies/CallRef/getSellerProfiles.html

It is not until you look on the homepage for this API that they recommend to use the new Accounts API. Going to the service endpoint for for the original XML api pretty much indicates that this API is no longer in use, but there is no official word in the documentation that it has been taken offline.

Only thing I can think of is to migrate original CS-CART calls to new REST API or make a hybrid version of addon where I add the ebay features that I need that use OAuth.

I have made more progress in making the eBay addon useful for our business, but it definitely requires some customisation. Things I changed were:

- Ignore in built cscart shipping and return policy and hardcode our ebay store shipping and returns policy ids. This is not really the fault of the addon, I don't believe the addon was ever advertised as supporting ebay stores that are using profiles

- Update the ProductFeature class to implode with comma for multicheckbox product feature types. Currently it is just returning an array, which can't be converted to a string without implode

- Put some constants in place that refer to the max length for an ebay product title (80 chars) and ebay item specific value (65 chars), I also used the product title constant in the override product title on ebay as a friendly reminder to admin staff that the title is too long

- Limited the number of pictures being sent to ebay. There is a 12 picture limit on listings, so I just used array_slice on the pictures array before sending. You might lose a couple of pictures, but it will just error out otherwise

- Supplied product feature prefix and suffix to the item specfic sent to ebay... might as well use them if they are provided

- Added the ability to start and end listings from inside a product edit page. Rather than having to either go to the template and update all products or select the product from a product results list and then export to ebay. You can still do these of course, but it is much more convenient to do it from the product page...

Other work to do, that isn't urgent, but would be useful for the business...

- Automatically start ebay listing when product amount on CS-CART goes from out of stock to in stock

- Automatically end ebay listing when product amount goes from in stock to out of stock

Hope that is of use to someone else out there!!

No updates on ebay addon for many years now, probably its discontinued

ebay addon isn't working properly with products variations when import the product to ebay.

When use Variations as separate products
Export the product to ebay as separate product with the size on the product name but not one product.

When use Variations as one product
Export the product to ebay as separate product without the size (because can't change the product name in Cs-Cart by size) but also not one product.

I think that if We use Variations as one product must export to ebay ONE PRODUCT with the size as option... so this addon isn't working. Need to fix this minor error.