An eBay listing is a published offer for a product you sell in the eBay marketplaces. The inventory management features included in MIP can help you manage your offers and keep track of your inventory.
What you need
To use the MIP inventory management features, you must have the following information about your business and your products available:
Required information
- Location - You can use the Location feed to set locations. You must have at least one inventory location set up before you can create and publish offers.
- Inventory Item - For each product you offer, including the product variations that may appear in an eBay multiple-variation listing, a product record/definition is required. This product record is created through a product or product-combined feed.
- A seller-defined SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) value for each product. This value must be unique within your inventory.
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Product details, including a product description, product title, item specifics, and URL locations of each image (photo)
- Quantity available for purchase through standard shipping
- Condition of the product
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Links to product images / photos
- The eBay category where the product will be listed (unless you specify an eBay catalog product that is already mapped to a primary listing category, in which case category information is not required)
- The eBay marketplace (site) where the product will be offered
- The price of the product
- Business policies that set payment, shipping, and return-related values and settings in the offer (if not specified, eBay applies the last used business policies)
Optional Information
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The listing format
- Full paths to one or two eBay Store categories for sellers who own an eBay Store and wish to upload the product to one or two eBay Store categories
- Product variations
- Unique identifier of a merchant's store if the product will be made available for sale through the In-Store Pickup or Click and Collect programs
- Any tax-related information including the use of tax tables, VAT percentages, or third-party tax category exception codes
- Compatible Products - the product compatibility feed allows you to create a compatible product list
Management process
A published offer is the equivalent of an eBay listing. For basic inventory management, you can create a product feed to list the product details, an availability feed to list the available quantities of your products, and a distribution feed to apply business policies (payment, return, and shipping) and pricing information. Alternatively, you can use a product combined feed (see Using product combined feeds) to upload product, availability, and distribution information in a single feed. See About inventory management for additional information.
The process of managing inventory includes the following tasks:
- Setting up MIP for your business
- Creating and uploading product, availability, distribution, and product combined feeds
- Viewing the feed response files and making changes as needed
- Downloading and understanding reports
These feed types are used to manage your inventory:
- Product feeds: Add new products and modify existing ones
- Availability feeds: Add and update quantity information for products at specific locations.
- Distribution feeds: Add and modify the business policies (payment, return, and shipping) used, pricing information, eBay and Store categories used, and more
- Inventory feeds: Update the prices and available quantity of products already on the eBay site
- Location feeds: Specify locations such as the seller's local store or warehouse locations
- Order fulfillment feeds: Find out which of your ordered products have been shipped to the buyers, how they were shipped, and the carrier tracking number
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Category metadata feeds: Return required, preferred, and optional item specifics for a categoryID, specific to a channel
- Delete-Inventory feeds: Delete one or more SKUs from MIP and/or delete one or more listings from the eBay site
- Product search feeds: Find a specific product that is available in the eBay product catalog
- Product combined feeds: Upload product, availability, and distribution information in one feed
These tasks are explained in detail in these topics: