ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
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Yes, you will need to sign up to use File Exchange. Signing up merely sets a token in your account settings. If you remove the token, then you sign up again.
See post#2 in the pinned "File Exchange Limit" topic on this forum where there are links to sign up and to acess File Exchange. There are also links to download the manual.
The manual is now quite old, and there are new features added to eBay's interface that are not in that manual, but the bulk of it is correct.
File Exchange allows creating an offline spreadsheet that can be uploaded to eBay to create, revise, or end listings. When creating listings, start with the templates provided by the File Exchange management page since those have the correct headings that you would need for most uploads. In some cases there will be columns that you don't need, and in other cases, columns will be missing that you should add for your particular situation.
The XLS templates include sticky note instructions, whereas the CSV versions of those templates do not. I generally like to work within an XLS format and then export the results to a CSV for upload to File Exchange.
Revisions to existing listings generally need only the ItemID and the field that is to be revised (along with the leading Action column that tells File Exchange your intent).
There are two ways to load files into File Exchange. The simplest is to just upload your plain text CSV file on the tool's upload screen. The second method is to use a server to parse and upload an XML file.
In either case, there is no facility to upload photos in File Exchange. Photos must be hosted on an external website and the links to those photos would be included in your CSV file. eBay will use those links to attempt to fetch those online photos and rehost them on eBay servers. If eBay fails that attempt, you may see your photos delivered in the listing directly from that external host. There will be no zoom feature on those.
@bimm_corp wrote:Thanks for replying. Which file exchange format would include the item description in a field?
All of them. The item description is a required field for any new listing, so all the templates will include that field. Start here to select a template:
https://pages.ebay.com/file_exchange/SMP_FEselecttemplate.html?id=0
I would recommend starting with the "Item Specifics Category template". If most of your items are in one category, then you might select a root category that includes most of those items.
Oops. I misinterpreted your question. All formats allow you to add the description, but none of the File Exchange downloads will return a description. I don't know why, but can only surmise that some sellers' descriptions are just too large and complex to manage in a spreadsheet, so eBay omits the description field, which I find very discouraging.
You can download the Price and quantity report from File Exchange to get a list of ItemID and Price. But you'll have to use one of my tools to extract the description.
The columns you will need for your File Exchange revision file will be:
Action,ItemID,StartPrice,Description
The Action will be "Revise".
The ItemID and StartPrice will be provided by File Exchange.
The ItemID, CurrentPrice, and Description can be extracted using this tool, as long as they are not hidden due to "out of stock" or "adult":
https://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/ActiveContent_support/BulkEditorInstructions.htm
With that introduction, it may be best to describe what you would like to do with your description. You may want to download the original descriptions with no modifications and make your alterations within Excel, or you may want to use the elaborate wildcard options of the online tool to automatically modify your descriptions and automatically generate a spreadsheet of revisions that you can upload to File Exchange.
If you are just trying to revise or remove a phrase or a few words that are boilerplate in all of your descriptions, you can use the bulk find/replace feature in eBay's own Bulk Edit And Relist tool (BEAR). This is the bulk editing option that can be found on your Active Listings page within your account. eBay's BEAR will process the HTML version of your description, so the underlying HTML in the revision section must also match exactly.
It won't be called BEAR on the page itself. Checkmark all of the listings you want to modify and select the option to Edit either "All" or the selected listings. That should launch the BEAR editor where you can again checkmark all listings and choose to edit descriptions (you may see BEAR in the URL).
I'm frequently foiled when searching for this one as well. After opening the Bulk editing screen, open the "Edit Fields" dropdown located at the top left of the BEAR tool. Look down that alphabetic list for "Item description" rather than for "description". (Ignore the "titles" field that I have highlighted for another purpose.)
This will open yet another window where you can choose how to edit your descriptions, either individually when each change is different, or in bulk when the edits are all the same.
I captured these screens today from the Hub, starting on the Active Listings page:
https://k2b-bulk.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ListingConsole¤tpage=LCActive
From there, the BEAR tool launches, but I can't provide a direct link to BEAR as it requires a list of item numbers in order to launch. However, I've displayed the URLs in the screenshot.
