Feature request: Promotion manager active?

GarageSale
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There’s been an increasing amount of “devops danger” at eBay when using Promotion Manager markdown sales lately. Starting in mid-September, sellers have been reporting latency of 12+ hours on the launch of markdown promotions, and as of today I’m experiencing 36+ hours of latency for new listings not being added to an existing (and apparently working) markdown.

Not GarageSale’s fault in any sense. Just a reality of working with eBay these days. Their database indexing and cloud services are just not sustainable at the size they are nowadays.

However, I do wonder something: I spent a half hour today on the phone with Seller Services, trying to find an item from my active listings that was launched more than 24 hours ago, and which should have been grabbed by the markdown Promotion Manager process. So we could send a direct example to the devops people at eBay support.

It was hard. Eventually we did find a few, and I also learned there is a difference between creation time and indexed launch time at eBay.

I found myself wondering whether it would be possible to mark items in GarageSale with active Promotion flags/tags. It looks as though there is a separate Promotion Manager API system, separate from that of the listings, and so I’m not sure whether this would involve doing some kind of a join of a downloaded Promotion table with the database of listings on the client side, or whether there might be a separate table available in the API that I missed that associates a listing with Promotions.

In any case, I can see several places where these “newer” eBay features like Promotion Manager and Send Offer control behavior of the eBay API. Obviously, the “actual” net listing price of items sold under Promotion is affected. But also Revise Item is disabled for items for which a “Send Offer” is still live.

In sum: Is there a possibility that GS might annotate the listings with their status in Promotions and/or Send Offer?

My simplest use case would be: Find the subset of active GTC listings for which an active Markdown Promotion has not yet been applied.

Obviously this is not a high priority for me. It just seems like there’s a trend at eBay to have these auxiliary tables of promotions, offers, promoted listings and so on that affect individual listings in complicated ways, and it would be useful some day to see that.

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It’s on our to do list, but it will certainly take a while until we get there:

2 or 3 years ago, eBay started to introduce new functionality as new, separate APIs, e.g. the Promotion Manager API. While I can see eBay’s rationale, for now it makes it harder for us to add features that are only available in the new APIs. Here is why:

  • Adding support for a new call in a API we already support is much easier, than adding support for a completely new API
  • The new APIs is a different authorisation mechanism, which we need to implement first
  • Instead of making a single call API to start a listing, which includes all relevant options for that listings, we have to make multiple calls for enabling some features, such as promotions, e.g. one call for starting the listings, and another to enable promotions for it
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And (speaking as a software developer and manager here) I’m definitely not suggesting you implement GarageSale interface for managing Promotions and the rest. That would be a nightmare for everybody involved—more than eBay already makes it on the web interface.

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