Reconnecting / Relinking Listings on eBay to Items in SureDone

Have your eBay listings become disconnected from your SureDone listings? Are you seeing more items listed on eBay than in SureDone? This is actually a fairly straightforward issue to resolve since SureDone can link to live listings without having to end them.

How can you tell you have disconnected listings?

The easiest way to figure this out is to go into your eBay seller center and see how many items it shows actively listed, and then do a search on SureDone for ebayid:>0 (or ebay2id:>0 or ebay3id:>0 etc.). If the number of items shows listed via the eBay seller center is higher than the number returned in your search, you need to relink them.

What's the general process?

Basically, through SureDone we're going to download a file of all of your active listings on eBay. Then we're going to modify that file to only have three columns - the action=edit column, the guid column and the ebayid column. Then we'll go into the bulk upload section of SureDone and upload this file, skipping all channels and using the force flag. This will update the SureDone database with the live listing ID and relink the products between the two systems. It might take a bit to download the eBay listing file (depending on how many items you have there) but the entire process is pretty simple and straightforward.

After you relink the items, you should also look for items on eBay that may be duplicates. Due to workflows or automations, we've found that this sometimes happens when products become unlinked.

And lastly, since the items weren't linked, any changes to those items (price, latest inventory numbers or other fields) may not have updated since the item was unlinked. Take the file you used to re-link, change the action to "relist", leave only the guid column, and then do a bulk upload and skip all channels except for eBay. This will update all of the relinked items with your latest information.

Is your eBay instance authorized in our "new" interface?

In late 2020 we moved our eBay configuration from our older user interface to our "Version 3" (v3) interface. If you have been a customer of SureDone since before that time, even if you have been successfully listing, updating inventory, retrieving orders, or having no problems with communicating to eBay, you may need to go through the authorization process in our new interface before you can download the eBay listings file.

Basically, go to Channels > eBay (or to the eBay instance you need to relink items in). Go to the Authorization tab. If it doesn't say "You are ready to go!" then click on the "Authorize eBay" button to start the authorization process. You'll need to do the normal eBay authorization and then the oAuth authorization. Just follow the steps. Then you'll be able to import eBay items.

Make a Backup

Any time you make changes to SureDone that could affect numerous listings and change critical aspects of the system, it's a good idea to make a backup of all of your items.

Go to Bulk > Export or Products> Export, depending on the user interface you're in, select all of the fields under "Add Export Fields" and click on "Add" to select them for export. Then click on "Export" to complete the export. You can choose to download the resulting file (which may take some time depending on the number of items in your account) now or at a later time.

Steps to Relink eBay Items

1. Go to Channels > eBay (or to the specific eBay instance you want to relink items on).
2. Click on the "Import" tab.
   
   
   
   
3. From the dropdown, select the approximate number of items you have on eBay. You'll then see two selections for a Full Import or a Sample Import.
   
   
   
   
4. Select the "Full Import". Enter in your notification email (important if you have a lot of items - we'll email you when the import is complete). Click on "Import All Products".
   
   
   
   
5. You'll see an "In Progress" message next to the import. Click on this to see your actual progress.
   
   
   
   
6. When the import is complete, the screen will change to allow you to import the "File in Account" or to "Download Import File". Click on "Download Import File". This will download the file to your computer.
   
   
   
   
7. Now you need to modify this file so that only the columns you need are in it.
   
   PLEASE NOTE: DO NOT OPEN THIS FILE IN EXCEL OR SIMILAR PROGRAMS. IF YOU HAVE LONG HTML DESCRIPTIONS, THE FILE WILL NOT DISPLAY OR SAVE PROPERLY.
    
   
8. Go to a system like https://www.editcsvonline.com/ to edit the CSV. We're going to show you how to use that particular free system here.
9. Once the site is loaded, click on "Open" and select the file from your computer. Depending on the number of items you have, and your Internet upload speed, it may take some time to upload and appear on the screen.
   
   
   
   
10. Once your file is loaded in, you'll see the headers across the first line and data underneath.
    
    
    
    
11. An eBay import can have hundreds of columns depending on how many item specifics you have defined. We only need three columns - the action column, the guid column and the ebayid column.
    
    Delete all of the columns except for these three. You can shift click on columns to select multiple at the same time to delete. See this short video below.
    
    
12. If you have multiple eBay instances connected, change ebayid to ebay2id or ebay3id, etc. to reflect the correct channel to change.
    
13. Save your modified file once it only has the columns you need.  Note: Make sure that the format of cells for ebayid field is changed to "Number" with no decimals so MS Excel doesn't change the values due to scientific notation issue - when you save the file in CSV format.
    
14. Within SureDone, go to Bulk > Upload (or Products > Bulk Uploads depending on what user interface you're in).
    
    
    1. Click on "Choose File" and select your modified file from the last step. 
    2. Check the box to the right of Force to enable Force (ebayid is a protected attribute so needs to be forced in).
    3. Check the box to the right of "Skip All Channels" to tell SureDone not to update channels. We're only doing a SureDone database with this change so no need to send any information to any channels.
    4. Click on Upload.
15. Now you can click on "Results" to see the status of your upload. Once the upload is complete, you will find your items in SureDone will all be linked to their respective items on eBay.

Please keep in mind that this will only relink your items. It will not update inventory for any items that had been unlinked until a new order comes in, an automation pushes new inventory levels or you reload/update your items.

An approach to this might be to edit the file you just uploaded, change the action=edit to action=relist, remove all columns other than guid, and then uploading this file via bulk again WITHOUT Force being checked and skipping all channels except for the ebay channel the file is relative to.