Listing Items

Listing an Item

Fees Resulting from Listing an Item

Getting Recommendations to Improve a Listing

This chapter discusses how to list new items to the eBay site. For additional information, including information about the Description field and many optional features for listings, see Describing Items in a Listing.

The primary force that drives the eBay model is the sale of things to buyers. The first step in selling an item to a buyer is listing the item on the eBay site where a prospective buyer can see and, hopefully, purchase the item.

Items can be listed to an eBay site interactively using the eBay user interface on the Web. This is done on what is called the Sell Your Item pages (or SYI for short). They can also be listed using an application. Item listings created on an eBay site and through an application are functionally the same. When an item created using an application is viewed on the eBay site, it looked and behaves the same as an item listed using the eBay site. The reverse is also true.

In the API, an item listing is represented by the Item object. There are a number of aspects to an item, from the title and price to the amount of time the listing appears on eBay to how the item appears visually. These aspects translate directly to properties of the Item object. So when an application lists an item with values specified by the seller, it is closely analogous to the seller supplying the same values on the SYI page.

Some item properties affect the appearance of the listing on various pages where items are viewed (the View Item page, the search page, the category browse page). Other properties affect how a prospective buyer goes about purchasing the item and how much that buyer needs to pay. Still other properties do not have an effect until later on, in the checkout process.

User-Contributed Notes