canonical: https://jentic.com/apis/ebay.com

# eBay APIs

eBay's developer APIs cover both sides of the marketplace. Buyer-side APIs search listings, download bulk item feeds, surface deals and best-sellers, and match products to eBay's catalog. Seller-side APIs configure account policies, run Promoted Listings and coupon campaigns, process orders and refunds, buy shipping labels, detect listing-policy violations, send offers to interested buyers, and read seller-performance metrics. A Developer Analytics API reports live quota usage across every eBay resource. All APIs use OAuth 2.0 against api.ebay.com, with buyer-side discovery APIs accepting application tokens and seller-side APIs requiring a seller user token.

## For AI agents

An agent can search and discover eBay listings, deals, and catalog products, then act on a seller's account by managing policies, running ad and coupon campaigns, processing orders and refunds, buying shipping labels, and reading performance and compliance data. It can also check API quota before running high-volume jobs.

## Scope

Use for: Automating eBay marketplace workflows across buyer-side discovery (search, feeds, deals, catalog) and seller-side operations (policies, advertising, orders, shipping, compliance, analytics) through eBay's OAuth 2.0 REST APIs

Not supported:
- payment gateway processing
- listing creation endpoints
- buyer messaging
- webhook subscriptions
- legacy SOAP APIs
- on-prem deployment

## APIs

| API | Category | Endpoints | Description |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| eBay Marketing API | marketing | 82 | Run promoted listings campaigns, manage keywords and bids, and build coded-coupon and discount promotions for eBay sellers. |
| Account v1 API | e-commerce | 36 | Configure an eBay seller account programmatically - create and manage fulfillment, payment, and return policies, custom policies, sales tax tables, and seller programme opt-ins. |
| Feed API | e-commerce | 23 | Run bulk seller jobs on eBay - upload listing/order/inventory feed files, schedule recurring exports, and download report files. |
| Fulfillment API | e-commerce | 15 | Process eBay orders post-checkout - read order detail, create shipping fulfillments with tracking, issue refunds, and manage buyer payment disputes. |
| Browse API | e-commerce | 7 | Search eBay listings by keyword, image, GTIN, or category; retrieve item detail; check vehicle-part compatibility. |
| eBay Logistics API | e-commerce | 6 | Fetch eBay-negotiated shipping rates, buy a label for a chosen rate, and cancel or download labels for shipments tied to eBay seller accounts. |
| Deal API | e-commerce | 4 | Discover eBay deal items and time-bound events, and list the items eligible for each event for shopping and savings use cases. |
| Item Feed Service | e-commerce | 4 | Download bulk eBay item feed files (full and hourly snapshots) by category and marketplace for offline catalogue ingestion. |
| Sell Analytics API | analytics | 4 | Read eBay seller-performance data - traffic reports, customer-service metrics with peer benchmarks, and seller-standards profile ratings. |
| Analytics API | developer-tools | 2 | Read live eBay API quota usage - calls remaining, window length, and reset time - for any eBay REST or Trading API resource. |
| Catalog API | e-commerce | 2 | Search eBay's product catalog by keyword or retrieve product details by ePID. |
| Charity API | e-commerce | 2 | Search and look up nonprofit organisations registered with eBay for Charity by keyword or charity_org_id. |
| Compliance API | e-commerce | 2 | Detect which seller listings violate eBay listing policies. |
| eBay Negotiation API | e-commerce | 2 | Find eBay listings eligible for Send Offer to Interested Buyers and send discounted offers to those interested buyers in bulk. |
| Buy Marketing API | e-commerce | 1 | Retrieve best-selling and merchandised eBay products by category for recommendations, deal feeds, and shopping agents. |
| eBay Recommendation API | e-commerce | 1 | Get eBay seller recommendations for which listings to promote and the suggested ad-rate strategy via a single find endpoint. |

## Which API to use

| Need | API | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Find or look up individual eBay items | main | The Browse API does live per-item keyword, image, and GTIN search plus full item detail; use it for low-volume, real-time lookups. |
| Ingest the eBay catalog in bulk | buy-feed | The Item Feed Service downloads full and hourly TSV_GZIP feed files by category, meant for offline mirrors of tens of millions of listings rather than per-item calls. |
| Match a product to eBay's catalog for listing | commerce-catalog | The Catalog API returns structured product data by ePID or keyword to pre-fill listing fields, unlike Browse which returns live buyer-facing listings. |
| Run broad advertising and promotions | sell-marketing | The Marketing API covers Promoted Listings campaigns, keyword bidding, coupons, and storewide promotions across 82 endpoints. |
| Send a targeted discount to specific watchers | sell-negotiation | The Negotiation API delivers Send Offer to Interested Buyers discounts only to buyers already engaged with a listing, narrower than storewide Marketing promotions. |
| Process one order at a time | sell-fulfillment | The Fulfillment API handles per-order reads, shipping fulfillments, refunds, and disputes in real time. |
| Export orders or update inventory in bulk | sell-feed | The Sell Feed API runs asynchronous bulk jobs and recurring schedules, replacing long sequences of per-row Fulfillment or Inventory calls. |
| Read seller-performance metrics | sell-analytics | The Sell Analytics API returns traffic reports, customer-service metrics, and seller-standards ratings. |
| Check remaining API call quota | developer-analytics | The Developer Analytics API reports rate-limit and quota state for every eBay resource, used to throttle before hitting limits. |

## Cross-API use cases

### List, promote, and fulfill a seller catalog

An agent configures account policies, matches inventory to eBay's catalog for accurate listing data, then picks which listings to promote and runs the ad campaign, and finally processes the resulting orders. The flow spans setup, advertising, and post-checkout fulfillment.

Example prompt: Create fulfillment, payment, and return policies via Sell Account, match items with Catalog, call Recommendation to pick listings to promote, create the Promoted Listings campaign with Marketing, then read new orders and create shipping fulfillments with Sell Fulfillment.

### Diagnose a sales drop and act on it

An agent reads seller-performance and compliance signals to find why sales fell, then acts on the underlying cause by adjusting ad bids or sending targeted offers to interested buyers. It combines read-only diagnosis with write actions.

Example prompt: Pull traffic and defect metrics from Sell Analytics, check Sell Compliance for at-risk listings, raise bids on strong listings via Marketing, and send Send Offer to Interested Buyers discounts via Negotiation on stalled watch-list listings.

### Conversational shopping and deal discovery

A shopping agent answers buyer queries by searching listings, surfacing best-sellers and time-bound deals, and resolving any attached charity so it can show verified donation detail. It stays entirely on buyer-side application-token APIs.

Example prompt: Search listings with Browse, pull ranked best-sellers from Buy Marketing, list active events from the Deal API, and resolve any listing's charityId through the Charity API to render a donation badge.

### Bulk catalog ingestion with quota-aware scheduling

An agent mirrors a slice of the eBay catalog by downloading bulk feed files, but first checks remaining API quota so a large pull does not fail partway through. It pairs a heavy read job with a pre-flight rate-limit check.

Example prompt: Call Developer Analytics /rate_limit to confirm remaining quota, download full and hourly feed files via the Item Feed Service, and fall back to Browse per-item lookups for any records needing live detail.

## Why Jentic

- **Setup:** Wiring eBay by hand means implementing OAuth 2.0 twice, the client-credentials flow for buyer-side application tokens and the authorization-code flow for seller user tokens, then pointing requests at the right api.ebay.com host for each of these APIs. With Jentic you install once, add the eBay APIs you need from the Jentic directory, store the eBay OAuth credentials once, and your agent calls them.
- **Permission scoping:** Many eBay operations put a resource id in the URL path, such as a campaign, order, shipment, or charity id, so your own rules can pin an agent to a single resource. You also choose which operations an agent may call, so a read-only shopping agent can be limited to Browse and Deal lookups while a fulfillment agent gets order reads and shipping without refunds unless you add them.
- **Credential handling:** Your eBay OAuth application and seller credentials are stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected at execution time. They never enter the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
- **Discovery method:** Agents search the Jentic directory by intent such as 'search eBay listings by keyword', 'create an eBay Promoted Listings campaign', or 'mark an eBay order shipped', and Jentic returns the matching operation with its input schema so the agent calls the right endpoint across eBay's buyer-side and seller-side APIs without browsing the reference docs.

## Related vendors

- **Shopify** — Storefront and order APIs for sellers running their own shop who cross-list to eBay.
- **Etsy** — Adjacent marketplace with its own listing and sale mechanics for handmade and vintage inventory.
- **Amazon** — Competing marketplace with selling-partner APIs for orders, listings, and fulfillment.
- **Walmart** — Marketplace seller APIs for multi-channel sellers listing beyond eBay.

## FAQ

### Does one eBay credential work across all of these APIs?

No. All eBay APIs use OAuth 2.0, but buyer-side discovery APIs such as Browse, Item Feed Service, Deal, Buy Marketing, and Catalog accept an application access token from the client-credentials grant, while seller-side APIs such as Account, Marketing, Fulfillment, Feed, Analytics, Compliance, Negotiation, and Recommendation require a seller user token from the authorization-code grant. Each API also expects its own scope, so you request tokens per API rather than sharing one.

### Which eBay APIs need seller consent and which do not?

Buyer-side discovery APIs run on an application token with no user consent, so an agent can search listings, read deals and best-sellers, and download feeds without a seller signing in. Seller-side APIs operate in the authenticated seller's context and require that seller to complete an OAuth consent flow before the agent can manage policies, ads, orders, or performance data on their behalf.

### How do the buyer-side and seller-side eBay APIs fit together?

The buyer-side APIs (Browse, Item Feed Service, Catalog, Deal, Buy Marketing, Charity) discover and describe listings, while the seller-side APIs (Account, Marketing, Recommendation, Negotiation, Fulfillment, Feed, Analytics, Compliance) configure and operate a seller's own listings and orders. A full workflow often starts with catalog matching and discovery, then moves into seller setup, advertising, and fulfillment.

### When should an agent use bulk feeds versus per-item calls?

Use the Browse API and Fulfillment API for real-time, low-volume, per-item work such as looking up one listing or processing one order. Switch to the Item Feed Service for buyer-side bulk catalog downloads and the Sell Feed API for seller-side bulk inventory and order jobs when the volume runs into thousands or millions of records, since one feed file replaces a long sequence of individual calls.

### Are any of these eBay APIs restricted or read-only?

Several buyer-side APIs are Limited Release and require eBay business-unit approval before production use, including the Item Feed Service and the Deal API. The Deal, Charity, Catalog, Sell Analytics, Sell Compliance, and Developer Analytics APIs are read-only. Seller-side APIs like Marketing, Account, Fulfillment, Feed, and Negotiation include write operations that act on the seller's account.

### How can an agent avoid hitting eBay rate limits across these APIs?

The Developer Analytics API reports live quota state for every eBay resource, at both the application level and the per-user level. An agent can call it before launching a high-volume job to confirm enough calls remain for the target resource, then defer or re-plan the job until the window resets rather than failing partway through with rate-limit errors.