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.

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.
  • Products in Activation must have a quantity greater than 0 before creating a new offer on eBay.
• 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.

Publishing a Promotional Price for an Offer on eBay

This guide provides a temporary method for displaying a discounted price as the main selling price for an eBay offer while still showing the original price. This is necessary because Akeneo Activation's current Offer Import mechanism does not explicitly support sending dedicated promotional offer attributes to eBay.

To achieve a promotional display (e.g., "~~$19.00~~ Now $15.79"), sellers must map both the discounted price and the original price using distinct data sources and attributes.

Best Practices

To successfully update an eBay offer with a promotional price, you must provide the discounted price via the Offer Import File and the original price via the Product Information Catalog Mapping (Catalogs for Apps).

Step 1: Prepare the Offer Import File

• Use the primary price attribute in your Offer Import File to send the discounted amount, as eBay requires a price for any offer update.

Step 2: Map the Original Price in Product Information

• To ensure the original price is visible on eBay, send it as the original_retail_price through your product mapping.
• Navigate to your Catalog Mapping (product information).
  • map your Akeneo attribute (e.g., original_retail_price ) to eBay's Original Retail Price attribute.
• Ensure the original price value (e.g., 19.00) is provided in this mapped attribute.

Step 3: Export the Offer

After preparing the Offer Import File and updating the Product Information Mappings, import the file. The offer will update on eBay, displaying the discounted price as the current selling price and the mapped value as the original retail price.