Overview

Connecting your Akeneo PIM to eBay (including eBay Motors) via Akeneo Activation lets you manage product listings and offers efficiently. Understanding the distinction between a product export and an offer export is fundamental to successfully publishing and maintaining your listings on the eBay marketplace.

Before publishing or updating any offers on eBay, ensure that your offer data (such as price and stock levels) is correctly associated with your product information in Akeneo Activation. eBay requires complete product data to create a listing, and associated offer information to make it available for sale.

Before you export: eBay business policies and inventory location

To create a listing, eBay needs to know how you ship, how you accept payment, how you handle returns, and where your stock is. In eBay these are three business policies and one inventory location. You create them in eBay, then give Activation their identifiers when you map your eBay catalog.

Policies are specific to an eBay marketplace (for example eBay US or eBay Germany). If you sell on several marketplaces, you need a set of policies for each one. If you connect a new eBay account, you need to set up its policies and enter their IDs again, because the IDs of your previous account do not carry over.

Note: Activation needs the policy identifiers, not the policy names. A name such as "Standard shipping" is not accepted in place of the ID.

Step 1: Create your business policies in eBay

1. Sign in to eBay and open Business policies from your account settings. You can also go directly to https://www.ebay.com/bp/manage, using your own country's eBay domain (for example ebay.de).
2. Create a payment policy, a return policy and a shipping policy.
3. Give each policy a short, specific name without special characters, so that you can recognize it later (for example "Activation - standard shipping").

Your shipping policy determines the countries your listings can be bought from. Only enable countries you can and want to ship to.

Note: if you do not see Business policies in your account menu, you may need to opt in to business policies first. On some eBay sites they are hidden in Seller Hub, in which case you can manage them from your country's eBay website.

Step 2: Get the ID of each policy

eBay assigns a numeric ID to each policy when you create it. You need the ID of your fulfillment (shipping), payment and return policies. There are two ways to get them. Most people should use the first one.

Option A: From your eBay account (no technical knowledge needed)

1. Sign in to eBay and open your Business policies page.
2. Click the name of one of your policies to open it.
3. Look at the address bar of your web browser. The address ends with the policy's ID, as a number that follows profileid=. For example, in an address ending in &profileid=123456789, the ID is 123456789.
4. Copy that number and note which policy it belongs to (shipping, payment or return).
5. Repeat for each of your three policies.

Note: the exact address can look slightly different depending on your eBay site and on whether you use Seller Hub. If you cannot find a number after profileid=, use Option B, or reach out to Akeneo Support.

Option B: With an API call (for technical users)

If you or your team prefer to work with eBay's API, you can read your policies, with their names and IDs, from eBay's Account API using your own seller account. Replace EBAY_US with the identifier of your marketplace (for example EBAY_DE).

• Fulfillment policies: GET /sell/account/v1/fulfillment_policy?marketplace_id=EBAY_US
• Payment policies: GET /sell/account/v1/payment_policy?marketplace_id=EBAY_US
• Return policies: GET /sell/account/v1/return_policy?marketplace_id=EBAY_US

Each response lists your policies. For every policy, the ID is in the fulfillmentPolicyId, paymentPolicyId or returnPolicyId field, next to the policy's name.

Step 3: Get your merchant location key

Every eBay offer must be tied to an inventory location, which is the place your stock ships from. In Activation, the location is identified by its merchant location key. This is a short key (up to 50 characters) that is chosen when the location is created in eBay, and it cannot be changed afterwards.

If you are not technical: you do not need to create the location yourself. Reach out to Akeneo Support with the address of the warehouse or store your stock ships from, and we will provide the merchant location key to use in your mapping.

If you work with eBay's API: eBay manages inventory locations through its Inventory API. You can list your existing locations, together with their keys, with GET /sell/inventory/v1/location. To create a new one, use the createInventoryLocation call: it needs at least the location's name, city, postal code and country, and the key you choose is part of the call's address (POST /sell/inventory/v1/location/{merchantLocationKey}).

Step 4: Add the values to your eBay mapping

1. In Activation, open your eBay catalog and go to its mapping.
2. In the offer section, map the fulfillment policy ID, payment policy ID, return policy ID and merchant location key to the values from the previous steps. You can use a static value, or a PIM attribute if different products need different policies.
3. Save your mapping, then run a product export to publish your listings.

Publishing new offers

To publish a new offer on eBay for the first time, use the product export job in Akeneo Activation.

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 (title, description, images, and category-specific details) to build the product page. Sending offer data without the corresponding product information results in an error.

Workflow for new offers:

1. Link product and offer data in Akeneo Activation. Products must have a quantity greater than 0 before creating a new offer on eBay.
2. Configure your product catalog for the eBay channel, including your business policies and inventory location (see above).
3. Run the product export to publish the new listings.

Updating existing offers

Once a product listing exists on eBay, you can update offer information, such as price and stock quantity, using the offer export job. This process is faster and more efficient because it only sends the data points that changed, rather than the entire product dataset.

Use the offer export for routine updates, including:

• Price adjustments
• Inventory level changes

To update core product information (such as the product title or description), run a full product export again. The offer export is limited to offer-specific attributes.

Managing offers on eBay

You can manage offers for eBay directly within Akeneo Activation. This feature supports importing and synchronizing commercial data, such as prices, stock levels, and channel-specific fees, via manual, API, or FTP workflows. See Import product offers to Activation for details on available import methods.

The offer import template for eBay requires specific fields that differ from other marketplaces.

The order of columns in your CSV file is flexible. Akeneo Activation processes the data correctly as long as the required headers are present.

Due to eBay's API requirements, base_price_amount and stock_quantity must always be included in every offer update, even when only one of these values has changed.

Publishing a promotional price for an eBay offer

In Akeneo Activation, you can display a discounted price as the main selling price for an eBay offer while showing the original price struck through, for example "$19.00 Now $15.79". Because Akeneo Activation's offer import does not have a dedicated promotional price field, this display requires mapping both the discounted price and the original price in your offer import file.

How to set up a promotional price on eBay

Step 1: Prepare the offer import file

In your eBay offer import CSV, set the following fields:

The original_retail_price must be strictly higher than base_price_amount for the struck-through display to appear. If the values are equal or the original is lower, the promotional display does not render.

Step 2: Import the file and push the offer to eBay

Import the offer file in Akeneo Activation. Once imported, the offer export pushes the update to eBay. The listing displays the discounted price as the selling price and the original price struck through.

Simple product support only

Variant products are not currently supported for offer creation and update.