9 minPro

Connecting eBay

The eBay authorisation, the business policies to turn on in your seller account and the stock address: the three things without which nothing publishes.

Open the screen in StockFeel

Linking eBay takes two minutes. What takes the rest of the time is what eBay requires on its own side before it accepts a listing published from outside: business policies and a stock address. Without those two things the connection shows green and no listing goes through.

Marketplaces are part of the Pro plan. And you need an already active eBay seller account: StockFeel publishes with your policies, it does not create them.

What the connection does, and what it does not

It is there to publish an item from your inventory, change its price, end or relist a listing, pull photos, a description or a market price from similar listings, and keep the state of your listings current: a listing ended on eBay goes back to "ended" in StockFeel.

It is not there to detect your sales. An eBay sale is spotted in the confirmation email, so by the Gmail connection, not by the eBay API. The two connections complement each other: see Connecting your Gmail mailbox.

Only listings published from StockFeel show up. The Listings page and the sync only follow what StockFeel put online itself. A listing created directly on eBay, before or after connecting, is never imported: StockFeel does not see it, does not change its price and does not mark it ended. To manage it from here, end it on eBay, then publish the item from your inventory. Its sales still come in through the confirmation email.

First step, on eBay: turn on business policies

An eBay listing has to declare three policies: shipping, payment, returns. On the classic selling flow you fill them in on every listing. To publish from outside, they have to exist as saved business policies, each with its own identifier.

Open business policies
On eBay: My eBay, Account, Site preferences, then the Business policies section. If it offers an opt-in button, use it: an account is not enrolled by default.
Create your three policies
A shipping (fulfillment) policy: your carriers, your handling time, your costs. A payment policy: on an account with eBay managed payments it is nearly empty, and that is normal. A return policy: accepted or not, within how many days, at whose expense.
Note the three identifiers
Open each policy for editing. The identifier is the long run of digits visible in the page address, usually after profileId=. That number is what StockFeel expects, not the name you gave the policy.

Do it once, properly, with policies you will use across your whole catalogue. Changing policy later only means pasting a new identifier.

Second step, in StockFeel: authorise and fill in

Open Configuration, Selling platforms section
Settings, Configuration, the first section on the page.
Click Connect eBay
You land on eBay's consent screen. Sign in with the seller account, not a secondary buyer account, and accept.
Check the card you come back to
It shows your eBay username, the detected marketplace and the last synchronisation date. Until a listing has been published, that date stays at "never".
Open Policies and stock address
That button unfolds six fields. The first three take the identifiers noted on eBay: Shipping (fulfillment), Payment, Return.
Fill in the stock address
Postal code, City, and Country as two letters, FR by default. eBay requires it to compute the shipping costs and delivery times shown to the buyer. Your home address will do, it is not displayed on the listing.
Save
The button label goes from "to fill" to "configured". That is the signal that publishing is possible.

Publishing a first item

From the inventory, open an item and choose to publish it on eBay. Two conditions are checked before anything is sent:

at least one photo on the item, eBay refuses a listing without an image;
a strictly positive price, taken from the item's estimated value or from the price you type when publishing.

The eBay category is derived from the item's category. Title, description and item specifics can be edited just before sending, and a description can be generated from your templates.

The listing accepts best offer by default. The published quantity follows the stock quantity: selling one unit elsewhere updates the listing.

Keeping listings current

Reconciliation with eBay fires at two moments, and at no other: when you open the Listings page, at most once every ten minutes, and when you press the synchronisation button.

The two do not do the same thing. Opening the page only looks at active listings, which is a light check. The button goes over the whole history, ended listings included: it is the only path that can bring back a listing wrongly marked ended, after a relist for instance. It is capped at five presses a minute.

When it does not work

"Price missing." The item has neither an estimated value nor a typed price. Fill in one of the two.

"At least one photo required for eBay." Add an image to the item before publishing.

An error returned by eBay about the policies. An identifier pasted wrong, a stray space, or the identifier of a policy deleted since. Reopen Policies and stock address and paste the three values again.

"eBay is not responding." The eBay API is momentarily unavailable. Nothing is lost, try again shortly.

A listing that disappears then comes back. Reconciliation marks as "ended" a listing eBay can no longer find. One press of the synchronisation button, which goes over the full history, puts it back online if it really is active.

Disconnecting

Disconnect removes the authorisation. Your items, your sales and the listings already recorded stay in StockFeel: only actions towards eBay stop, and live listings go on living on eBay. Policy identifiers and the stock address are kept, so reconnecting does not ask for them again.