Sandbox API always returns 0 results

[musiciansbot]

Following the documentation, when I run multiple requests, I always get 0 total results:

Request URL: https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/buy/browse/v1/item_summary/search?q=drone&limit=3

Response:

{
"href":"https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/buy/browse/v1/item_summary/search?q=drone&limit=3&offset=0",
"total":0,
"limit":3,
"offset":0
}

Status Code:200 (Success)

Request URL: https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/buy/browse/v1/item_summary/search?q=phone&category_ids=220&limit=3

Response:

{
"href":"https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/buy/browse/v1/item_summary/search?q=phone&limit=3&category_ids=220&offs...",
"total":0,
"limit":3,
"offset":0
}

Status Code: 200 (success)

Request URL: https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/buy/browse/v1/item_summary/search?q=piano

Response:

{
"href":"https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/buy/browse/v1/item_summary/search?q=piano&limit=50&offset=0",
"total":0,
"limit":50,
"offset":0
}

Status Code:200 (success)

I'm wonder why all queries to the sandbox API return my 0 results?

[joes_us_cv68ey5b0i]

Sandbox is broken and has been for a long time. Ebay doesn't seem to care and will charge you $70 just to submit a bug report, which is insane. You actually have to pay ebay to report a bug in their API, and there's no guarantee they will do anything about it.

I suggest ignoring the sandbox all together and using the production keys instead. There's no hope of getting ebay to fix it in any reasonable time, I was asking this exact same question nearly a year ago and nothing has been done.

One more tip: The pagination results the API provides are inconsistent and the total results will vary wildly every time you go to the next page. If you need pagination controls, you will have to account for incorrect data. Going to the next page might suddenly make that page not exist, because somehow there's 2000 less results in the search, but ONLY when you try to access that offset page...