eBay

nutfusionltd · ‎11-09-2025

Hello eBayers,

I have a quick question regarding the possibility of editing variation names and variation option names in bulk for my eBay listings. Doing it manually would be very labour-intensive and time-consuming, and not really that sustainable in the long run.

I own a nut and dried fruit shop here on eBay UK. Most of my listings have a variation called "Item Weight" and "Free sample". The latter has four options: "Organic nuts", "Organic dried fruits", "Sweets" and "You choose! Let us know your sample via a message".

Essentially, what I would like to achieve is this:

Change the name of the variation "Item Weight" to "Weight"
Change the name of the variation option "You choose! Let us know your sample via a message" to "You choose! or something similar

The reason why I want to apply those changes is to have consistency in my listings and avoid having an option name which is too long. The string "You choose! Let us know your sample via a message" has indeed too many characters which prevent the eBay API from returning the whole item title in the orders I manage via the ebaysdk package in Python.

I've already tried the following methods:

Systematically change the names via the ebaysdk package in Python. I tried the

ReviseFixedPriceItem

call in different ways, but it never worked. It always outputted an error, the most common one being the Price doesn't correspond or Failed call, which don't seem to be related to what I am actually trying to achieve. LLMs (like ChatGPT) couldn't help much either.

Used ISDNtek as suggested by another user here: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Seller-Tools/Modifying-Variation-Specific-Names/td-p/32923844, but it didn't work. The listings just kept loading forever and no change was applied.
Downloaded and changed eBay's native CSV report options, but none of them seem to allow this kind of change. If you try changing the names, it says that the listings are not recognised.

Does any of you have any idea on how to achieve this? Or is manual work the only way to do it?

Thank you very much indeed.

alvisinwales · ‎13-09-2025

If you are able to use the Trading API call ReviseFixedPriceItem then you could change from "Item Weight" to "Weight" using ModifyNameList. You need the item numbers.
Here's what the XML looks like for one listing revision:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ReviseFixedPriceItemRequest xmlns="urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents">
<ErrorLanguage>
en_GB
</ErrorLanguage>
<WarningLevel>
High
</WarningLevel>
<Item>
<ItemID>
123456123456
</ItemID>
<Variations>
<ModifyNameList>
<ModifyName>
<Name>
Item Weight
</Name>
<NewName>
Weight
</NewName>
</ModifyName>
</ModifyNameList>
</Variations>
</Item>
</ReviseFixedPriceItemRequest>

For info see:
https://developer.ebay.com/devzone/XML/docs/Reference/eBay/ReviseFixedPriceItem.html#Request.Item.Va...
https://developer.ebay.com/api-docs/user-guides/static/trading-user-guide/update-variations.html

You could also change variation values but this has to be done by deleting the affected variation(s) first and then adding new ones.

nutfusionltd · ‎01-11-2025

Hi alvisinwales,

Right, so if I need to change a variation option value, let's say from "600 g" to "500 g", under the variation called "Item Weight", I first need to delete the option "600 g" and then add "500 g"? That will be very time-consuming, especially for many listings.

I thought there should be an option to do that in bulk without dropping the other values such as price and quantities. 3rd-party tools would be good to use as well.

Thank you.