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 eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

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Posted by Richard

eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

We have been busy coding the Easify eBay Channel Connector for quite a few months now.

For the past 12 months we've had an eBay Connector working in a live eCommerce environment, albeit in a hard coded form that means all the various parameters such as selling category, shipping options, payment methods were all set in stone and could not be changed without editing the code. Clearly not much use for your typical business that will want to list products in different categories, with different shipping options and possibly different payment methods.

The large part of the development work so far has centered around writing a configuration system that will allow you to configure exactly how your products are listed on eBay without having to leave Easify Pro to do it. Although it wouldn't be a problem for you to log into eBay, find the product listing and tweak it, we decided that we wanted to reduce the amount of time you'd need to spend in the eBay website and centralise as much as we can into Easify. This has meant that coding the eBay configuration system turned into quite a large and very complex task.

The good news is that we are almost finished with the configuration system and in the next few days will be moving onto finalising the code that will upload products to eBay. Remember earlier I said that we have had a live eBay connector for about 12 months... This means that the uploading code is already written and quite well matured, so the next and final phase should go quite quickly.

Here's a few work in progress screen shots of the eBay configuration code in action within the Easify Pro Client...

When you have added an eBay Channel Connector in the Easify ECommerce Channel Manager, youi will get a new eBay Settings Tab appear

Here you can configure the default selling options for your products on eBay...

We have tried to keep the layout very similar to the layout you would find in the eBay website to keep your learning curve to a minimum

In the above screenshots you can see the settings as they would be applied globally. In other words the settings that you would apply here will affect all products that you upload from Easify to eBay.

However you will also be able to configure the same settings for each Category in Easify, and also for each subcategory and each individual product.

This means that you could setup your shipping options globally on the eBay channel connector, you could configure the categories that the products will sell in on each Easify category, and for each individual product you could override the shipping method, or indeed any other eBay setting that you wanted to.

So in other words, you could configure the eBay listings on each and every product that you sell, or if you only ever sold products in one eBay category and using one shipping method, all you would need to do is configure the global eBay channel connector settings once, and every product would inherit those settings...


Regards - Richard (Easify Developer)

Posted by Tommy

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Hi

Looking good any dates yet

Andy Notton


A Notton

Posted by Richard

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Tommy said:

Hi

Looking good any dates yet

Andy Notton

Hi Andy,

No dates at present, we've hit so many unexpected delays so far that it's difficult to tell if we're a week from completion or 3 weeks. However, we're very close to the first release.

The config code is now complete and is undergoing tests, all is looking good with that even though it managed to throw us a few last minute curveballs.

Currently we're finishing off the actual eBay server code (which is relatively straight forward) and we're also working on the final documentation (help files) and I'll be putting together a comprehensive tutorial video about it in the next week or so.

So although we haven't put a firm date on the release, it's always a good sign when we start on the documentation.


Regards - Richard (Easify Developer)

Posted by Richard

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Since eBay place great emphasis on their sellers to upload multiple product images, in fact they rate sellers that upload multiple product images more highly than those with a single product image we decided to take a slight diversion on the route to launching the Easify eBay Connector and add support for multiple product images directly into Easify.

It's only added a week onto our schedule and I'm sure you'll agree that the end result will be well worth it.

Here's a screenshot of the new Easify Product Info editor showing that you can have as many product images as you need.

Each image that you add to the product appears as a thumbnail on the left, and you can click a thumbnail to load it full size on the right.

You will be able to set the order of the images, which means you can choose which image is your main image for the product.

The new product image user interface has been highly optimised for use with our Cloud Servers, and uses a minimum of bandwidth making it fast and responsive even over slow connections.

Once we've got the code tested we will also release an update to the Easify WooCommerce plugin which will allow multiple product images to be uploaded to your WooCommerce website.


Regards - Richard (Easify Developer)

Posted by Tommy

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Thats looks and sounds great

Andy


A Notton

Posted by Tommy

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Hi All

Any updates please

Andy


A Notton

Posted by Richard

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Tommy said:

Hi All

Any updates please

Andy

Not at present, things are still going well however and we've been making good progress. We're looking at a matter of days now rather than weeks. I will keep you posted.


Regards - Richard (Easify Developer)

Posted by Richard

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Just a quick update on the Work in Progress on the eBay connector...

Today we've been firming up the error handling for the connector so that in the Easify ECommerce Channel Manager you will get much more detail in the event of an error.

Given the complexity of eBay it is likely that you will receive error messages from them to let you know about problem with your eBay account, listing limitations, listing errors etc... So we want to make sure you get a good deal of detail to help you troubleshoot issues.

We've also included the ability to be notified by email when an error occurs. So if something causes a product update to get stuck, you will receive an email telling you all about it.

Now this also presented us with a problem, which is that by default the Easify ECommerce Channels will automatically re-try a failed notification every 15 seconds. So as you can imagine if you're in the situation that you hit your eBay listing limit and the failed upload is re-tried every 15 seconds, you would receive an email every 15 seconds until the issue is resolved or the ECommerce Channel is paused. So to get around this we need to modify the ECommerce Channels so that they don't retry every 15 seconds forever. We will probably introduce some additional configuration so that the channel will retry every 15 seconds for a minute, then retry every 5 minutes for half an hour and if still no joy the channel will be paused. Alternatively we may modify the system so that you only get emailed once, but either way we need to resolve this scenario before the code goes live. Not a major show stopper but will add another couple of days onto the schedule.


Regards - Richard (Easify Developer)

Posted by Tommy

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Nothing is that easy in life so keep up the hard work

Andy Notton


A Notton

Posted by Richard

Re: eBay Channel Connector - work in progress...

Tommy said:

Nothing is that easy in life so keep up the hard work

Andy Notton

Haha, thanks for the encouragement Andy - we're burning the overtime on this one!


Regards - Richard (Easify Developer)

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