General
Does WP-Lister work with all eBay sites?
Yes, WP-Lister works with every eBay site, but only one site per installation.
What are the requirements to run WP-Lister?
WP-Lister requires a recent version of WordPress (3.3+) with WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce, MarketPress or Shopp installed. Your server should run on Linux and have PHP 5.2 or better with cURL support.
Listing Items
I use products variations on my site but eBay doesn’t allow variations in the selected category. How can I find out in which categories variations are allowed?
To learn more about variations and allowed categories you should visit this page: pages.ebay.com/help/sell/listing-variations.html. There you will find a link to eBay’s look up table for categories allowing variations.
Can I include a gallery of my other items as part of a listing template ?
This has been implemented in WP-Lister 1.2 – which is currently in beta. You can use one of four Cross Selling Widgets: most recent items, items ending soon, featured items and related items (WooCommerce only).
I have multiple images per product and WP-Lister generates a nice gallery further down in my listing description. How do I get my additional images to the top, right below the main image?
This is intentional – images embedded in your item description are hosted on your website, while images within are hosted by eBay. eBay used to charge for every additional image that is uploaded – but now allow up to 12 free images hosted on their servers using EPS (eBay Picture Service).
To activate this feature, enable “Upload to EPS” in your profile, which will make listing and revising much slower though.
When I change the product name, why doesn’t the name shown on the listings page get updated?
The listing title is generated when a profile is applied the first time – that is, right after you selected your products and did the “prepare listing” step.
At this time, the title prefix and suffix are applied and any shortcodes such as [product_category] are replaced – that gives you the actual listing title when you view the Listings page instead of placeholders. And it allows some users to edit the generated listing title and as they like it before they actually list the item.
So while price, quantity, attributes, etc. will be automatically update when you change an item, the listing title will only be regenerated when you select the items and choose “Re-apply profile” from the pull down menu.
Can I manually relist an item on the eBay website?
You shouldn’t do this, as relisting an item will change it’s ID and WP-Lister might fail to import transactions for the new item properly. You should use WP-Lister’s relist feature instead.
If you have already relisted some items manually on ebay.com, please make sure that you click the “Update all published items” button in WP-Lister afterwards.
I recently added new categories to my eBay store but they don’t show up in WP-Lister.
WP-Lister doesn’t get notified by eBay when you create new store categories, so you need to visit WP-Lister -> Tools and click on “Update eBay data”, which will update all categories, payment methods, shipping services, etc.
How do I get discount listing fees?
If you’re going to list a bigger number of items, you should probably think about getting your own eBay Store. You will pay a monthly fee to eBay, but you’ll get greatly reduced listing fees in return – plus your own storefront where you can create custom categories. It usually pays for itself as soon as you list more than 20-30 items per month.
How do I list to eBay Motors?
Set the eBay site to “US” and enable eBay Motors in WP-Lister -> Settings.
What is the difference between “splitting” and “flattening” product variations?
Let’s say you have 5 different variations of an item.
Splitting would create 5 separate listings on eBay – 5 times the listing fee but 5 times the visibility as well.
Flattening would list all of them as only one listing – with details about the other available variations attached as a list to the products description.
Inventory
How does the stock control work if a sale is made via eBay? Will I have to update the stock manually within WooCommerce or is there some information posted back to WooCommerce to adjust the amount automatically?
Yes, WP-Lister can update your product stock when an item was sold on eBay.
To enable this feature you need to configure “Automatic Updates” in WP-Lister’s settings. You should enable both “Update transactions” and “Reduce stock”.
This will use WordPress internal taskplanner wp_cron to check eBay for new sales on the set time interval. You can also run this check manually by clicking “Update transactions” on the transactions page.
We are working on using the eBay Platform Notification system to get instant notification on any sale, but this will take some more time. As eBay states in their own API documentation, platform notifications are not considered “reliable”, so every application that uses them should frequently check for new transactions anyway.
Profiles
Taxes/Tax rate – what do I select if my prices already include 20% VAT?
You should enable taxes by selecting Taxes: “fixed tax rate” and enter “20″ into the field “Tax rate (percent)” below.
Is there an option to enable free shipping?
Free Shipping is not an option to select from, but instead you have to select the actual shipping service you are going to use and just enter zero (“0″) for “first item cost” in the shipping options box.
Additional Items – Does this refer to the additional cost in buying another of the same item?
Yes. It sets the additional shipping cost for any second or further item – from this listing (item). So it only applies if you actually list items with a quantity greater that one.
Misc
I installed WP-Lister on a staging site first and moved to the production site now. What do I need to do to activate my license on the live site?
When you have activated WP-Lister on a site / domain where you would like to move it away from, what you should do is tick the checkbox that reads “Yes, I want to deactivate my license for domain.com” so you can activate the same license after migration on a different site / domain again.
If you already deleted your old site and forgot to deactivate it, you can just contact us and ask to deactivate your license key for the old domain.
Are you going to support listing to the Amazon Marketplace in the future?
Yes, there will be WP-Lister for Amazon, but it’s going to take a while – probably this summer.
Debugging
I’m getting some error while trying to list or to verify an item.
WP-Lister can log all communication with ebay to the database to help debugging cases like this.
To enable this logging feature, you have to follow these steps:
- visit WP-Lister -> Settings -> Developer
- change “Log to database” to “Yes”
- click “Save Settings”
- now, you’ll see a new WP-Lister subpage called “Log” – and WP-Lister will log all communication with eBay
- repeat the verify action that produces the error now…
- visit “Log” – you should see the new log entry
- open this log entry by clicking on the request name (“VerifyAddItem” in this case)
- click “send to support” in the top right of the just opened window
Steps 1-4 have do be done only once to activate logging. After that, it’s quite simple.