Overview

Use GetCategoryFeatures in combination with GetCategories to check whether a site and its categories support various features. For example, you can check which categories support the Best Offer feature, or you can check which categories support 10-day listing durations for fixed-price items. Specify the features you want information about by using FeatureID. The available features are defined in FeatureIDCodeType. If you do not specify a feature ID, GetCategoryFeatures returns information about all features that are defined for the call.

A list of all available feature definitions (basically, the name of each feature) is returned in FeatureDefinitions list at the root level of the response. This information does not necessarily imply whether the site supports the feature.

To keep the size of the response as small as possible, GetCategoryFeatures returns feature settings in a hierarchical way:

The most common setting for the feature across all categories is defined in a SiteDefaults list at the root of the response. For example, if most of the site's categories support Best Offer, then BestOfferEnabled is set to true in the site defaults. If most categories do not support Best Offer, then BestOfferEnabled is set to false in the site defaults.
If a given parent category and all of its subcategories override the site's default setting for a feature, the parent category is returned with the overridden setting. For example, if the site default for BestOfferEnabled is false, parent categories that do support Best Offer will be returned with BestOfferEnabled set to true. If none of their subcategories are returned, you can assume that all of their subcategories use the same settings as the parent categories do. (Use GetCategories to determine parent-child category relationships.) If any of their subcategories have different settings, the highest-level subcategories are returned with those settings. Again, you can assume that lower-level categories share the same settings as their parents if they aren't returned.

If you pass in a particular category ID in the request, the call returns the settings that are applicable to that category and its children. That is, if no Category node is returned, then the category and its children support the same settings that are shown in the site defaults. If the category overrides the any of the site's settings for any features, those overridden settings are returned in a Category node. If any of its subcategories have different settings, additional Category nodes are returned as applicable. See GetCategoryFeatures Samples.

Listing Durations Feature

You can use GetCategoryFeatures to check which listing durations are allowed for a given listing format before you specify a duration in AddItem. These listing durations are the standard durations that are returned by GeteBayDetails. However, whereas GeteBayDetails defines all possible durations, GetCategoryFeatures specifies which durations are applicable to each site, each category (potentially), and each listing format.

Please note that GetCategoryFeatures does not return settings for 1-day durations. That is, durations of 1 day are not returned, even if the listing type allows them. A 1-day duration is a special type of duration that is defined by several factors in addition to category. Even if the listing type allows it, a seller can use it only in certain cases depending on feedback score, auction format, and category type. Check ListingDurationCodeType to see if the listing type you want to use supports 1-day durations.

User-Contributed Notes