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How to upload in bulk on eBay

No matter what you are selling or who you are selling to, every eBay sale starts with the creation of a listing. Putting a single product listing online is over in a few mouse clicks. However, if you are keen to list several items at once, managing your eBay account can be very time-consuming.

Creating new listings in bulk is a great way to solve this!

These are the 5 easiest ways to speed up your eBay listing process:

  1. eBay Multiple Listing Tool: This is a point-and-click dashboard in your browser that acts like a spreadsheet/excel provided by eBay.
  2. Use eBay Listing Templates: You can save templates of listings and use them to start from next time you are adding listings.
  3. Upload product spreadsheets: You can upload spreadsheets (csv files) which contain all products you want to list via the Merchant Integration Platform
  4. Inventory Management Software: You can get paid software or paid web apps to list your products on eBay and manage them via those apps.
  5. Your own software: You can use the free eBay APIs if you build your own software to list products.

Create an eBay Sellers account

Hey, before you can sell on eBay you’ll first need to create an eBay sellers account. Visit the eBay create seller account page to get started.

eBay Multiple Listing Tool

eBay created the Multiple Listing Tool mainly for beginners who want a point-and-click site to create multiple listings.

The screen itself can be compared to a big table, or with some imagination like a personalized spreadsheet.

The advantage is that it’s easy to use even for beginners. The downside is that it takes a lot of point-and-click work, if your inventory is high it will take a lot of time.

Take into account that each time you enter the editor, you’ll have to start from either the previous listings you created, or from scratch.

How to access the Multiple Listing Tool?

Visit this direct link to the Multiple Listing Tool and bookmark it.

Or:

  1. Open your eBay Seller Hub
  2. Go to “Listings” tab
  3. In the top right corner you’ll see a blue button called “Create listing”
  4. Click that button and choose “Multiple listing”

Screenshot of the Create listing button in the Seller Hub

How to use the Multiple Listing Tool

The Multiple Listing Tool is basically a big table with rows, columns and cells.

Each row is one product listing. You start by adding one row, configuring the entire row and afterwards copying that row. This way if your next products have similar conditions, all that configuration is already present.

Screenshot of the Multiple Listing Tool

Configure product category

There is an extensive list of categories on eBay so I’m sure you’ll find a good one. You can search for a category using keywords or move through a hierarchical list.

Here’s how the category looks like:

Multiple Listing Tool – choose a category

You can also search for a category:

Multiple Listing Tool – search for a category

Important fields to configure in the Multiple Listing Tool

These are some of the important fields to configure:

  1. Category: You can choose a primary category for free, a secondary category may carry additional fees
  2. Photos: You can upload up to 24 images from your device
  3. Title
  4. Format: Auction the product or ask for a Fixed price (Fixed price needs to be combined with Buy It Now, but not the other way around).
  5. Duration: The default duration is 7 days, but you can increase it to 10 days, or lower it
  6. Available Quantity
  7. Buy It Now: Whether to allow a customer to buy it immediately and skip the auction. Read our Buy It Now article: https://www.img.vision/handbook/the-ebay-dilemma-auction-it-or-buy-it-now/

Once your product row is configured, you can hit the Preview button to see how the listing will look:

Preview of your listing in the Multiple Listing Tool

The Copy listing button allows you to copy a product row and start from those settings to sell another product. Here’s how the popup looks:

Multiple Listing Tool – Copy listing dialog

Use a Listing Template

If you are a frequent eBay seller and you have mastered the art of selling, you might want to take it one step further: creating your own reusable listing templates.

This allows you to give buyers consistent information across all your listings easily. It is also a huge time-saver in the long run since the listing conditions are pre-filled.

Once you have created a template, you can easily revise, rename, or delete it.

You can create up to 50 different listing templates. This makes it possible for you to switch things up. For example, you can switch between selling via auction-style format instead of a fixed price or you can vary the duration of your listings.

Here is a screenshot of the template manager:

Manage listing templates

How to create a new template in the Seller Hub

To create a template:

  1. Go to Listing Templates in the Seller Hub and select Create new template
  2. Name your template so you’ll remember the type of item and settings it covers
  3. Add in the rest of your listing details
  4. Preview or Save the template.

How to create a listing from a template in the Seller Hub

To create a listing from your template:

  1. Go to Listing Templates in the Seller Hub
  2. Select Create listing from the Actions dropdown menu
  3. Create your listing
  4. From the Actions dropdown you can also edit, delete, and copy your template

Here’s a screenshot of the Actions dropdown menu:

Create a new listing from a Listing Template

Merchant Integration Platform (MIP)

With eBay’s Merchant Integration Platform you can upload files containing all the product and inventory data to create a listing. You create the files, you upload them, eBay processes them and the listings are created.

This way of listing products is for businesses with a high number of products to list. This method is harder than using the point-and-click screens of the Multiple Listing Tool, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hard to do. In fact, the advantage is that once you get the hang of it, you’ll work faster than with the Multiple Listing Tool.

If you are familiar with feed files used with other marketplaces, such as Amazon or Google Shopping, you’ll know what this is about and will start selling in no time. In fact, eBay supports the Amazon feed files format as well.

I’ll focus on the eBay CSV spreadsheet/excel format, but to be complete, enterprise customers with an IT team, can besides spreadsheet/excel csv file format, also use XML files.

Step 1: Setup Channels to sell

Visit the MIP Channel Management page and add the channels where you want to sell on eBay.

The MIP Channel settings tell eBay the following things:

  1. Location of your warehouse: This is needed for customers to calculate the shipping costs.
  2. The eBay website to sell your products: For United States, pick EBAY-US

You can add multiple channels if you have multiple warehouses.

Channel management

Add a channel dialog

Step 2: Setup business policies

In the Channel Setup screen you can click the “Create” link to setup the required business policies as a seller.

You are required to setup 3 business policies when selling on eBay:

  1. Payment policy: How customers can pay you eg. credit card, PayPal
  2. Shipping policy: How you will ship your product
  3. Return policy: If customers can return items

You can create multiple policies. When creating the spreadsheet, you’ll need to specify the name of the policy that applies. For example:

ShippingPaymentReturn
US_Shipping_01US_Pay_01US_Return_01
US_Shipping_02US_Pay_01US_Return_01
US_Shipping_01US_Pay_01US_Return_02

Step 3: Set Feed Scheme to CSV

This is the easiest step. Basically, you need to tell eBay that the files you’ll be uploading with product data, what format they are in.

You can choose between eBay and Amazon, and within eBay you can choose between XML and CSV.

In your case, choose eBay with file format CSV.

A CSV is a spreadsheet/Excel file that is saved into a very basic plain text format. The table in your spreadsheet is written in a simple text file with a line for every row, and the columns are separated by a comma. (Geek tip: CSV actually stands for Comma Separated Values)

Set Feed Scheme to CSV

Step 4: Creating your CSV spreadsheets

You can upload various CSV spreadsheets to eBay, each with their own type of data. There are files about availability, adding inventory, deleting inventory, category data, etc. The full list of CSV files can be found on the eBay Merchant Integration Platform sample page.

What you need to create listings in bulk is only product-combines.csv.

Download this csv file and open it in your spreadsheet.

I’ll show you how 2 popular spreadsheet programs work:

  • Google Sheets
  • Microsoft Excel

Open your CSV in Google Sheets

First upload the product-combines.csv file to your Google Drive:

Upload your CSV file to your Google Drive

Then open the file and choose to open it with Google Sheets:

Open CSV file from your Google Drive in Google Sheets

The file will be loaded automatically into the cells, and you can start editing:

Google Sheets opening the CSV file

Open the CSV in Excel

Excel should automatically fill in the values in the correct cells.

If not, then use the text to columns button after selecting the first column:

Excel: CSV to columns

Choose that the values are delimited with a character:

Delimited option

Choose comma as character that is being used to separate the values. After which you can click Finish.

Step 5: Upload your product images and grab the link code

  1. Upload your product images to your www.img.vision account
  2. Select your uploaded image and copy the link code from the Share Bar
  3. Add the link code to your spreadsheet

Upload your images

Generate and copy the links

Paste the links in your Google Sheet in the right cell:

Image links in your CSV file in Google Sheets

Or paste the links in your Microsoft Excel app in the right cell:

Image links in your CSV file in Microsoft Excel

Step 6: Save your file as a CSV file

We must save the file back to a CSV file when we’re done, we cannot keep it as a fully featured spreadsheet file.

  1. In Google Sheets: File > Download > Comma-separated values
  2. In Microsoft Excel: File > Save As > Other locations > Browse

Download CSV from Google Sheets

Microsoft Excel saving CSV files

Step 5: Upload CSV spreadsheet

You can upload your product-combines.csv spreadsheet on the MIP Product Upload page.

After a CSV spreadsheet is uploaded, it is processed by eBay servers and listings are created.

Upload CSV files on eBay

Step 6: Handling errors

When a spreadsheet is uploaded, the processing of the listing rows in the spreadsheet can go flawlessly or may fail.

eBay will generate a result file per spreadsheet you upload where you can check if there are any errors.

You can download this results file from the same page you uploaded the CSV.

Third-Party Inventory Application

If you’ve got the cash, you can looks towards third party providers.

Third party providers on eBay come in all shapes and sizes. Examples of the available services include inventory and order management, shipping and fulfilment services, eCommerce platforms and… listings!

Many listing tool providers include pre-built templates in addition to custom design options & services. If you already have a design established, a listing tool can help implement into your catalogue and help check compliance with eBay’s policies.

Listing tools are usually available in conjunction with other tools such as Inventory and/or Order Management.

Some of eBay’s partners are:

  • ChannelAdvisor – prices are hidden but googling online we found they start at $750 setup fee + optional support fees + commission rate based on your sales between 2 to 4 percent
  • Feedonomics – pricing is hidden, but they say it’s based on SKU count and includes full service, there is no revenue sharing
  • SellBrite – starts at $29/mo for up to 100 orders per month
  • SixBit – 30 day free trial, starts at $24.99/mo. It’s a software program you install on your Windows pc
  • SureDone – free demo, starts at $500/mo
  • Linnworks – free demo, pricing is hidden, but googling around it looks like it costs £150/mo for 20,000 SKUs and 1,000 monthly orders

Don’t combine the Merchant Integration Platform with external inventory management tools

Word of warning! Once you start creating listings via third party providers, you shouldn’t edit your listings anymore directly using eBay’s tools. This includes the Single Listing Tool, Multiple Listing Tool, using Listing Templates or bulk uploading files using the Merchant Integration Platform.

The changes you make on eBay are not sent to your provider. So if you use that external tool to post something, you’ll end up with duplicates and other errors.

Your own software with eBay APIs

If this overview was not quite what you are looking for, and you are able to develop software/web apps or employ someone that can create software, you can take a look at eBay’s Developer Program.

By joining the program, you’ll get access to the eBay Sandbox environment and access keys to integrate the eBay APIs.

Using eBay API is free, but it does come with some requirements that can be found on the eBay website.

Whichever method you choose, we hope it saves you time and effort!

Good luck!

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