Home › Forums › Buying and Selling › Selling on eBay › Is there a way to backup Active listing data on eBay?
- This topic has 15 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 11 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
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10/04/2019 at 9:27 am #68562
So I tried searching the forum for an old thread, as I’m sure you all have talked about it, but I failed. Can somebody tell me if it’s possible to download current ACTIVE listings to an excel file? Would be excellent if I could also download images with that, but I’m fine if not. I’m just curious to know if I can easily back up my database or not. I know Jay often talks about his backup, but I forget what that is. I feel that way costs money, and I’m looking for a free version, but willing to ponder anything. Thanks
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10/04/2019 at 9:36 am #68563
We never found a good solution on eBay. They once had something called File Exchange, but eBay shut it down. It also didnt save photos, just the text.
We use Inkfrog which is a paid service. We like it because it stores our backups in the cloud. Plus it saves all the photos.
Others here use Sixbit and other services that are stored locally in your own database.
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10/04/2019 at 12:18 pm #68570
Jay, File Exchange is still active, I use it for uploading listings about every day. I think you might be thinking of Turbo Lister which was retired a few years ago. It was a listing app that could also be used to archive listings.
File Exchange can download a list of Active Listings, but just the details like Quantity, Price, Title, etc. Not the listing description information. I don’t think this is what gfd_622 is looking for though and you can get about the same information download from the bulk editor.
Spark Lister from Bonanza looks interesting, free if you sign up for selling on Bonanza, https://www.bonanza.com/turbo_lister_alternative. They claim to be able to download and archive eBay listings. It’s a Beta program at this time. I don’t know anything about it from personal experience.
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10/04/2019 at 2:59 pm #68582
You’re correct. I was thinking about Turbo Lister which has been ended.
What good is File Exchange if it doesnt save photos, descriptions, item specifics, etc? Does it just save the title?
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10/04/2019 at 2:42 pm #68581
I’ve been looking for a good backup program as well. Do you use the $29 professional plan?
Still looking for a good ebay to shopify intermediary. This might actually work. Neat.
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10/05/2019 at 10:25 am #68617
SixBit will handle everything for Ebay, Etsy and Shopify. They have various plan levels that you subscribe to for either Ebay by itself, or choose between two platforms or all three. Also WonderLister will do Ebay and Shopify at one time and Etsy was supposed to be added by now but unsure if they finished it or not, but I see one of their pricing tiers has 3 platforms listed.
SixBit and WonderLister does complete backups automatically that includes everything in a listing plus anything you enetered into custom fields, photos, and the Notes sections along with with all customer data, name, address, email addresses, everything. You can have them back it up to your own hard drive or to an external drive, dropbox, carbonite, OneDrive or Google Drive so the database is in the cloud. I backup to multiple sources so I will hopefully never loose anything or have to re-create. A plus to offsite is that with photos attached the databases will occupy almost all of your hard drive unless you have a monster drive.
EAT or Easy Auction Tracker will do Ebay only but it is a glorified spread sheet, you will have to back it up yourself and no photos just more basic info.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by
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10/04/2019 at 11:09 am #68566
So file exchange might be working, I can’t tell. The link is there, and it let me submit a job, so I’m just seeing what that does. States it will take a day. We’ll see if it ever shows up. I found that link right after I posted the original question. Thanks for the quick reply Jay, I’ll look into Inkfrog. That was the name I was forgetting.
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10/04/2019 at 11:23 am #68567
You’re right: https://pages.ebay.com/file_exchange/SMP_faq.html?id=0
Maybe it still works?I just remember people saying that eBay was no longer supporting it. Let us know how it worked.
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10/04/2019 at 12:22 pm #68572
You will likely be disappointed in what you get when you complete the File Exchange download and see the results. It is only basic information but not the description. I never used it to archive listings, I don’t think the result includes item specifics either.
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10/04/2019 at 12:20 pm #68571
I think the people you are hearing this from are confusing File Exchange with the retired eBay Turbo Lister application.
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10/04/2019 at 3:06 pm #68583
I haven’t tried the Spark app. I have an old Bonanza account that hasn’t been used in over 5 years, but I’ve been thinking about selling there again. Back then sales were miserable and I was still syncing inventory manually, the sales just weren’t worth the ongoing effort. I’ve been using an inventory management service (ecomdash) and they can sync with Bonanza now. It’s just an issue of expected return for the hours available.
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10/04/2019 at 3:22 pm #68585
You are right about file exchange – it was a bit disappointing. The main thing it has is price and title, beyond that it’s fairly useless as far as I’m concerned. I did want description (even just simple text would be ok), and it would be awesome to have pictures. I had a VERO situation the other day where the listing gets totally abolished, and I’ve had other issues in the past where listings just sort of go away (maybe if somebody buys something, then doesn’t pay, …..). I don’t remember specifics, but occasionally things disappear, so I was just looking for a way to back up all of my data.
What would be really nice would be the ability to download user defined specific fields in whatever order you wanted. So if I wanted an excel file that included start date, description, title, price, ….., I could make that. All that data is there, and I’ve seen data that suggests that somebody is downloading that information as indicated in reports, so it would be nice as a user to have, but it’s OK as is I guess.
With that, can we specify the order of the fields that print out in the sales data report? I usually just download it and then manually manipulate the fields, though I could do that using excel formulas I think. Just curious. Thanks for all the help
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10/04/2019 at 4:31 pm #68589
What’s really funny is that eBay offers up all the data you could possibly want about a listing (and more) via their developer API, but they give users basically no access to it at all. It would be trivial to dump it all out to a file and grab the images, so I don’t see a reason why eBay is cagey with it when just about every other site (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc) allow you to “take out” your data whenever you want for archival purposes. After the disappearing photo fiasco I expected them to offer such a service.
I have my inventory system syncing the stuff I care about (title, condition, used/new/etc, description, and images) and the rest is there if I wanted to store it. The one quirk is that eBay hides full-res images from users. I had to do some nutty work-around to get the “original” (the one that shows up when you’re hovering over an image) to download, and I’m not 100% sure how eBay feels about people doing that. If you’re willing to dive into it, there’s a Python package for the eBaySDK that it pretty easy to use. Once you set it up it’s as simple as calling GetActiveListings and then iterating through the pages of listings. It’s just JSON structs.
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10/04/2019 at 7:05 pm #68590
If it’s available via the API, maybe store backup/download is tool that the guy running flippertools.com would be interested in building, providing there’s a way in the API to authenticate ebay users – I wouldn’t want to make it super easy for everybody to download my listings.
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10/04/2019 at 8:43 pm #68595
The process is simple and he clearly knows what he’s doing, I’m just not sure donations could cover his costs for offering anything other than one-off backups. IMO, effective backups are ones that are always happening or scheduled frequently, so when when eBay suddenly shanks a listing you did two days ago you’ll have the data backed up and ready to go. I toyed with the idea of launching my own service that did this very thing, but couldn’t lock down a price that was fair to the user and made it worthwhile for me to maintain.
Anyone can access a listing’s details via the API if you have the item ID. There may be a few details missing, but most of it’s there.
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10/04/2019 at 9:39 pm #68597
Good point.
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