We spent most of yesterday photographing about 500 items for listing. I would like to try to move from using Listings as inventory to actually using GarageSale’s inventory system, so I can track various things in future. I won’t repeat all the stuff here, but it really shouldn’t be in the Listing records, it should be in the Inventory record and get copied to the Listings that I launch from those.
Anyway I have a folder full of photos, one or two each for now, and now I need to make a new Inventory record for each one.
When I was using Listings I could just hit cmd-N a few dozen times, and drag images into those new records. But I find there is no keystroke for “New Inventory Item”.
Please could be have a relatively simple way of adding them manually? In addition to the other stuff, of course. I suppose I can work around this by making one empty one with the manual and then duplicating it exponentially, but that produces random SKU values even when the duplicated inventory record has no SKU.
Which feels like a bug.
Just a keystroke or drag-and-drop or something that will let me make 100-1000 new inventory items, with no title or SKU set, so that (when they are scriptable) I can actually set those values as needed. If I can at least build a sketch of a listing as an inventory item, with my own non-eBay title and a non-eBay picture so I know what it is when I actually edit it for launch, it will help immensely.
I am never going to make one Inventory item and then make a Listing from that before doing the next. I will always be wanting to work with bulk collections of items, in various sized batches, in both tables.
I realize there is a simpler solution, which to be honest I’ve already asked about.
I have everything I need now to make a “placeholder listing” for new items like the ones we photographed yesterday, but which I am not going to send to eBay for days or weeks. I can add (and edit and script) the SKU to be the value I want, I can move pictures around, deal with description and all that.
If I could (1) make a new Inventory item automatically from a listing, when I am about to start it running on eBay for the first time, and (2) copy the information I need to track over to the Inventory table from my “temporary/sketch listing”, I would be able to proceed.
The point of the Inventory table is (by definition) to track physical objects I have here, and to link those objects to the (zero-to-many) offerings I make for each one on eBay. The point of the Listing table should be to track software objects on eBay, which represent offers, and to act as an interface with eBay for me. It looks like Inventory will track multiple listings, but only if they are linked by SKU, and I can make that adjustment. Except my Listings have SKU values inside their records which I cannot get into Inventory?
It’s backwards (relative to the business model) to make the Listing first and create an Inventory item after that is already filled out, but if I need to do it I will do it. But for now… I can’t?
Probably no. I am specifically trying to work with the Inventory data table here. I am already using Listings, but want the extra functionality that the Inventory table has in it. And it’s not scriptable at all.
OK @ilja and others, I am afraid that this particular thread (above) is not going to work for us anyway. I think I will have to deal with the Listing table only, because I didn’t understand that the Inventory view of Listings was a live view.
What I need to collect is the entire history of fees associated with a given Inventory item, over all listings, even if I empty the GS trash.
Nothing that is removed from Trash is ever shown in the Inventory fee list. Oops.
My wife suggests that I just grit my teeth and write an app of our own that queries the eBay API directly, gathers all the fees, and builds the report she needs for accounting. I really thought GS would be able to do that (because that’s what “Inventory” management implies for me) but I see now that the data we need is not retained.
I delete 10000+ listings from the GS trash every couple of weeks, because I stop and start listings that often. But some of those are 4 years old, and I expect things to be stopped and restarted (not “relisted” because that does not trigger the eBay server-side indexing correctly), 50+ times a year.
What I really need to do, I guess, is somehow find my listings periodically on eBay, download the associated fee data directly, and collate that here myself.
But I do (please) still want to have the scripting and extra info in the GS Inventory table And the ability to read and write User Attributes via scripts is vital. If I can get that, I can still make this work, I think.