Making a Call

Introduction to Service

The Business Policies Management API is a SOA service that is intended to be consumed by sellers who are interested in creating and managing payment, return, and shipping business policies to use with their eBay listings. High-level information for the service are covered below, including service endpoints, HTTP headers and URL parameters, naming conventions, and versioning scheme.

• Service Endpoints—The Business Policies Management API has unique gateway URLs (service endpoints) for the Production environment and the Sandbox environment. The service endpoint includes the service version (e.g., v1). When updating to a new major version of the service, you must update to a new service endpoint as well.
• The Business Policies Management API uses eBay's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework and requires that an eBay authorization token is passed in through either a header or a URL parameter.
• Schema and data type notes—The Business Policies Management API does not share schema or data types with other eBay APIs. In the API, you will find the following difference from other eBay APIs:
  
  • XML namespace is versioned. To prevent type collisions associated with backward incompatible service changes, the XML namespace is versioned. As with the service endpoint, when updating to a new major version of the service, note that the XML namespace will change as well.
• Naming conventions—The naming conventions for the Business Policies Management API are slightly different than the Trading API. Most notably, call names and fields in the Business Policies Management API begin with lowercase letters.
• Versioning scheme—The version numbering scheme for the Business Policies Management API is different from the scheme used by the eBay Shopping and Trading APIs. The Business Policies Management API version consists of three digits (e.g., 1.2.3):
  
  • The first digit indicates the major release version. Major releases are not backward compatible. eBay supports the two most recent major versions of the service. The service endpoints and target namespace include the major version of the service.
  • The second digit indicates the minor release version. Minor releases consist of feature additions or behavior changes that are backward compatible.
  • The third digit indicates the maintenance, or micro release version. Maintenance releases are used to correct minor problems. Maintenance releases have minimal impact on the features or functionality of the API. These changes may or may not have associated schema changes.

Supported Request and Response Formats

The Business Policies Management API supports XML and SOAP request and response formats.

The call response for SOAP requests is in SOAP format only.

Call Structure

Each Business Policies Management API call consists of the following elements:

• Service Endpoint—Business Policies API requests are sent to the Sandbox endpoint for the Business Policies Management API.
• HTTP Headers or URL Parameters—Each Business Policies Management API call requires an X-EBAY-SOA-SECURITY-TOKEN or X-EBAY-SOA-SECURITY-IFATOKEN header, or a SECURITY-APPNAME URL parameter. Similarly, you must always specify the call name in the X-EBAY-SOA-OPERATION-NAME header or OPERATION-NAME URL parameter. Other headers are optional or conditionally required.
• Standard Input Fields—The ExtensionType field and its four child elements are the only standard input fields for calls in the Business Policies Management API. These fields are optional.
• Call-specific Fields—The input fields that are specific to a particular API call.

Service Endpoints

Production Endpoint:

https://svcs.ebay.com/services/selling/v1/SellerProfilesManagementService

Sandbox Endpoint:

https://svcs.sandbox.ebay.com/services/selling/v1/SellerProfilesManagementService

Standard URL Parameter or HTTP Header Values

When you make a Business Policies Management API call, you choose whether to specify the standard values in URL parameters or in the HTTP header. URL parameters are provided as name-value pairs in the query part of the URI.

The following table contains descriptions of the standard Business Policies Management API parameters and the corresponding header values:

URL Parameter Examples

If you are using a URL (and the HTTP GET method), input must be in the NV (Name-Value Pair) format. Use the RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT header to specify that data is returned in one of the following formats: NV or XML. The following example (wrapped for readability) shows standard Business Policies Management API parameters. RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT specifies XML for XML output.

https://svcs.ebay.com/services/selling/v1/SellerProfilesManagementService
  ?X-EBAY-SOA-OPERATION-NAME=getSellerProfiles
  &X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-NAME=SellerProfilesManagementService
  &X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-VERSION=1.0.0
  &X-EBAY-SOA-SECURITY-TOKEN=<eBayAuthToken>
  &X-EBAY-SOA-RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT=XML
  &REST-PAYLOAD
  &Standard input fields
  &Call-specific input fields

HTTP Header Examples

The following example shows standard Business Policies Management API headers for an HTTP POST call using XML:

X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-NAME: SellerProfilesManagementService
X-EBAY-SOA-OPERATION-NAME: getSellerProfiles
X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-VERSION: 1.0.0
X-EBAY-SOA-SECURITY-TOKEN: <eBayAuthToken>
X-EBAY-SOA-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT: XML

The following example shows standard Business Policies Management API headers for an HTTP POST call. In the example, the X-EBAY-SOA-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT header specifies XML. The example also includes X-EBAY-SOA-MESSAGE-PROTOCOL: SOAP12, specifying that you are using SOAP Version 1.2. Without the X-EBAY-SOA-MESSAGE-PROTOCOL header, the service would expect XML input.

X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-NAME: SellerProfilesManagementService
X-EBAY-SOA-OPERATION-NAME: getSellerProfiles
X-EBAY-SOA-SERVICE-VERSION: 1.0.0
X-EBAY-SOA-GLOBAL-ID: EBAY-US
X-EBAY-SOA-SECURITY-TOKEN: <eBayAuthToken>
X-EBAY-SOA-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT: XML
X-EBAY-SOA-MESSAGE-PROTOCOL: SOAP12

Call-Specific Values

Refer to the Business Policies Management API Reference for the input and output fields supported by the Business Policies Management API calls.

Syntax

This section spells out the syntax requirements for the supported request and response formats. In most cases, the syntax for the various formats is standard and only the rules that aren't standard or are potentially tricky are explained.

• XML Syntax
• SOAP Syntax

UTF-8 Encoding for Special Characters

All parameter values should be encoded in UTF-8 format. UTF-8 is the default encoding for API requests.

Once the parameter value is UTF-8 encoded, it should be URL-encoded to take care of spaces and quotation marks (" ") and other characters in the string that are pertinent to the URL request.

When submitting requests in any format other than UTF-8, you must specify the message encoding with the MESSAGE-ENCODING URL parameter or the X-EBAY-SOA-MESSAGE-ENCODING HTTP header.

URL Encoding for String Values

Name-value requests must be constructed using the ASCII character-set only. Most ASCII characters (e.g., the numbers from 0-9 and the uppercase and lowercase English letters from A to Z) can be used as is. Some special characters, however, such as spaces, ampersands ("&") and quotation marks, must be encoded in URL requests when used in string values for fields.

Special characters that must be URL-encoded include (but are not limited to) characters used in URL request syntax, such as ampersands ("&"), the equals sign ("="), the pound sign ("#"), the "at" symbol ("@"), or the percent sign ("%").

URL-encoded characters are in the form %HH, where HH is a hexadecimal number. For example, the URL-encoded value for an ampersand is %26 and the URL-encoded value for a space is %20. The plus sign ("+") can also be used in place of spaces.

Many languages provide functions or methods to do the URL encoding for you. For example, PHP provides the rawurlencode function and Java provides URLEncoder class. For more information about URL encoding, see RFC 1738.

XML Syntax

The XML request/response format follows standard XML syntax conventions. Please see XML Syntax Rules on w3schools.com for more information.

SOAP Syntax

The SOAP request/response format follows standard SOAP syntax conventions. Please see SOAP Syntax on w3schools.com for more information.

Schema Location

You can download the latest version of the WSDL for the Business Policies Management API with the following link:

    https://developer.ebay.com/webservices/business-policies/latest/SellerProfilesManagementService.wsdl

Alternatively, you can access a particular version of the Business Policies Management schema using a URL with the following format (where VERSION is the version identifier of the release):

   https://developer.ebay.com/webservices/business-policies/VERSION/SellerProfilesManagementService.wsdl

The version identifier is the version number of a particular schema (a release number).

For example, you can access version 1.0.0 of the WSDL version of the schema at the following URL:

    https://developer.ebay.com/webservices/business-policies/1.0.0/SellerProfilesManagementService.wsdl

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