1. Contents
  2. Reference
  3. Channels and tasks
  4. eBay
  5. Categories Download

Categories Download

The task fetches the category tree from eBay into TRADElube. It runs before Products Upload, because an offer always belongs in one of the marketplace's categories, and that category has to be known in TRADElube before a product can carry it.

What gets transferred

For each eBay category a category is created in TRADElube, with its name and its place in the tree. It is created below the category standing under Root Category on the channel, see eBay.

Which categories these are is decided by the selection under External Root Categories. From every branch picked there TRADElube works its way down until the branch ends. eBay's tree is deep, and the execution takes accordingly long: it does not fetch one list but one level after another.

For every category TRADElube remembers the channel mapping, that is which category in TRADElube corresponds to which one at eBay. That is the link Products Upload needs later in order to hand the offer the right category number.

A category no longer occurring on the next execution gets disabled rather than deleted. So it stays in your set, with everything hanging on it, and merely stops being active. When you start the task by hand, TRADElube instead asks whether the categories no longer in use are to be deleted, naming how many there are. That difference has a reason: deleting is the more far-reaching decision, and nobody makes it in passing at three in the morning.

How the transfer plan is built

One plan with two sections, and both are narrow: what eBay gives out about a category is its name and its place in the tree, nothing more.

Section What sits in it
Common One row, Parent Category: which category the new one is hung under
Descriptions The category's Name, one tab per language version

Parent Category works through the channel mapping. Its source is the parent's category number at eBay, and TRADElube looks up which category in your set belongs to it. For the topmost categories of a picked branch there is no such parent. They therefore land directly below the category from Root Category.

Individualization pays off here in one place, the name. The tab per language version decides which language version of your category the name from eBay is written into. Where you keep your catalogue in two languages, the name from eBay arrives only in the language the marketplace delivers it in.

Special features and limits

The path runs one way only. A category you create yourself is not created at eBay, and there is no task for it either: a marketplace's tree belongs to the marketplace.

Description, image and the entries for search engines stay empty. eBay keeps none of these on a category, so there is nothing to take over. What you enter on such a category yourself stays: the execution only writes the fields the plan names.

The task runs only when you start it. That holds for every task of this channel, in full under eBay.

Once the Renewal Time has elapsed the execution also picks up what has not changed. Out of the box it sits at Monthly, which suits a category tree that rarely moves.

Further reading