Hi all,
I'm the developer here at 4x4 Tyres in the UK, I've done quite a bit with the eBay Sell API in the past but never tried creating multiple variation listings which I'm tasked with doing now. I'm just trying some things out in Postman and have made some progress but I wanted to ask a couple of questions and see if you guys could help.
The business I work for sells tyres and wheels for 4x4 vehicles and we are hoping to start listing packages on eBay that combine both Wheel and Tyre for given vehicles. So my plan is for every Chassis we provide for I will create a multi-variation listing for each wheel that fits that chassis. The common element of the multi-variation listing is the Alloy Wheel (or Rim as you call it in America). So for a single vehicle chassis, there might be 40 or 50 listings for different Rims. The variable element of the listing is the Tyre that fits the Rim, so for one Rim there might be 20 or 30 different Tyres that provide the ideal fit for the chassis. So the Tyre is selected via the dropdown menu, this would change the price and the image shown.
I've been playing with the API via Postman before I start writing any code to see if I can get it to work and I have managed to get a very simple test listing working for just a Red/Blue ball - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/116199989346. With this listing, the Grey ball image is associated with the Inventory Item Group, whilst the Red and Blue ball images are associated with the individual Inventory Items for those SKU's. It would therefore be plausible to imagine that I could do the same for my Rims and Tyres, the Rim image would be associated with the Inventory Item Group and then the Tyre images would be associated with the Inventory Items for Tyres.
The main issue I can forsee is that using the method I used to create the ball, the eBay listing for the Wheel/Tyre package would potentially have a gallery of 30+ images - 1 for the Rim and lots for all the different Tyres that go with the Rim. Firstly, I'm not sure if this would exceed any kind of limit eBay places on the number of images per listing, secondly, I'm not sure if showing this number of Tyres as selectable images in the gallery is confusing for customers when they are purchasing a package of 1 Rim and 1 Tyre?
Realistically what I'm trying to achieve is a bit more complex than a simple Red/Blue ball and more akin to a Bat and Ball package, where the Bat is common and the Ball can be either Blue or Red. Would it therefore be better for me to set the Rim up as a second variation even though there is only 1 - is that achievable with the Sell API?
Sorry for the long post, not the easiest thing to try and explain but hopefully you get it and can offer some advice.
Kevin
