Overview
Connecting your Akeneo PIM to eBay (incl eBay Motors) via Akeneo Activation allows you to manage your product listings and offers efficiently. Understanding the distinction between a product export and an offer export is crucial for successfully publishing and maintaining your listings on the marketplace. This guide outlines the correct workflow for managing your eBay presence.
Key Requirement: Linking Product and Offer Data
Before you can publish or update any offers on eBay, you must ensure that your offer data (such as price and stock levels) is correctly associated with your product information inside of Akeneo Activation. This pairing is a fundamental prerequisite, as eBay requires complete product data to create a listing and associated offer information to make it available for sale.
Publishing New Offers
To publish a brand-new offer on eBay for the first time, you must use the product export job.
This initial export sends the complete product information from your PIM, along with the associated offer data, to create the listing on the eBay marketplace. A product export is necessary because eBay requires all core product attributes (e.g., title, description, images, category-specific details) to build the product page. Simply sending offer data without the corresponding product information will result in an error.
Workflow for New Offers:
- Ensure product and offer data are linked in Activation.
- Configure your product catalog for the eBay channel.
- Run the product export to publish the new listings.
Updating Existing Offers
Once your product listing exists on eBay, you can update its offer information—such as price and stock quantity—using the more lightweight offer export job. This process is faster and more efficient as it only sends the data points that have changed, rather than the entire product dataset.
Use the offer export for routine updates, including:
Price adjustments
Inventory level changes
It is important to remember that if you need to update core product information (like the product title or description), you will need to run a full product export again. The offer export is strictly for updating offer-specific attributes.