The Compliance API helps sellers keep their listings in compliance with eBay’s policies. Use this API to identify for a given seller all listings that have violations. A listing violation can cause a bad buyer experience and may also prevent sellers from updating the listing until the violation has been corrected. The Compliance API is used to retrieve listing violations for different compliance types. Once listing violations are discovered in active listings for the seller, it is up to the seller to make revisions to these listings to correct the listing violations. The listing compliance types are summarized below:
- Aspects Adoption: this compliance type is used to see if a seller's listings are violating eBay's policy for aspects (item specifics). For each category, eBay maintains list of required and recommended aspects. When checking ASPECTS_ADOPTION, the response will include listings for which either a required or recommended aspect is missing or has an invalid value.
- HTTPS protocol: this compliance type is used to see if any listings are violating eBay's policy of using HTTP links in the listing description instead of HTTPS links. This requirement includes links to externally-hosted listing images. If the server hosting the listing images does not support the HTTPS protocol, this server cannot be used to host listing images. In the API interface, the enumeration value for this compliance type is
HTTPS. - Non-eBay Links: this compliance type is used to see if any listings are violating eBay's policy of not allowing links in the listing description to sites outside of eBay. The seller including a personal email address and/or a phone number in the listing description is also a violation of this policy. All communication between seller and buyers should be handled through eBay's communication system. The only exceptions to this outside links rule are links to product videos, information on freight shipping services, or any legally required information. In the API interface, the enumeration value for this compliance type is
OUTSIDE_EBAY_BUYING_AND_SELLING. - Product Adoption: Product Adoption is not enforced at this time.
- Product Adoption Conformance: Product Adoption is not enforced at this time.
- Return Policy: this compliance type is used to see if any listings have return periods that are no longer supported. Recently, many eBay sites (including US) deprecated the 14-day return period, so the minimum return period is now 30 days for many eBay sites. In the API interface, the enumeration value for this compliance type is
RETURNS_POLICY.
The Compliance API has the following two calls:
- getListingViolationsSummary: this call returns the number of active listings that are currently violating one or more compliance types. Results are grouped by each unique eBay marketplace and compliance type combination.
- getListingViolations: this call returns data on each listing violation in the seller's active listings. Results are grouped by listing, so if one eBay listing has multiple listing violations for a specific compliance type, these violations will be shown together. Only one compliance type can be used per call.
Technical overview
The Compliance API is a RESTful API that retrieves listing violations for any eBay listings, regardless of which user interface, tool, or API was used to create those listings. For those who are new to using eBay RESTful APIs, it is recommended that you read the Using eBay RESTful APIs document, which summarizes eBay developer account requirements, OAuth access tokens, handling error messages, and more.
The getListingViolations call is enabled with pagination control. With pagination control, the user can set a limit of the number of listing violations returned per page of data, and can use an offset query parameter to scroll through multiple pages of results (if applicable).
Business use cases
Below are the high-level use cases addressed by the Compliance API.
- Retrieve the number of active listings that have one or more listing violations.
- Retrieve data on all listing violations. The retrieved data includes the unique identifier of the eBay listing (and unique identifier of variation, if applicable) and details on the listing violation. Once the seller has this information on listing violation(s), the seller can use the createOrReplaceInventoryItem call of the Inventory API or ReviseItem/ReviseFixedPriceItem call of the Trading API to revise these listings.
Compliance API requirements and restrictions
To use the Compliance API (or any other eBay public API), the user must have an eBay Developers Program account. If you already have an account, but have never used eBay RESTful APIs, there are additional requirements that are covered in the Using eBay RESTful APIs document.
Supported marketplaces
The Compliance API is supported on all eBay marketplaces that have API support.