ebaysuds

Most of the Python libs for using eBay APIs I found are based on the Plain XML API. Which basically means the author of the lib has to handcode request-builder functions for every method they intend to support.

eBay have over a hundred and fifty methods accessible in the Trading API alone, each with some required and dozens of optional args. This basically means all the Python eBay libs are very incomplete and probably out of date too, because it's such a pain to maintain them.

SOAP

eBay provide a SOAP API too. The SOAP API is basically just the XML API with some additional verbose XML wrapping around it. But one advantage of the SOAP API is it has a WSDL… another XML file (5.3MB currently for the Trading API) that describes all the request methods and args and their types and responses.

Python already has an excellent SOAP lib in the form of Suds. So it seems like a better approach would be to use eBay's SOAP API via Suds...

Dirty…

…eBay's implementation of SOAP/WSDL seems to be a bit idiosyncratic (possibly… wrong) - at least it's not as smooth to call methods via Suds as it could be.

Clean Again…

So I made this thin wrapper around Suds, so that you can easily use all of the eBay API methods, in up-to-the-minute form, from Python.

Currently four eBay APIs are supported: Trading, Shopping, Finding and Business Policies.

I will add more APIs as I need them personally. It's also quite easy to make your own by subclassing APIBase and following the existing examples in ebaysuds.client.

pip install EbaySuds

from ebaysuds import ShoppingAPI
client = ShoppingAPI()
client.GetSingleItem(ItemID="321021906488")

Getting started

1. First you need to get yourself some developer keys from eBay here
2. You need to make an ebaysuds.conf file in the root of your project (or export EBAYSUDS_CONFIG_PATH=<path to conf> in your shell)
3. Easiest way is to copy ebaysuds.conf-example from this repo and fill in the blanks. site_id is the code of the eBay site your profile is on.
4. Make an ebaysuds.sandbox.conf file in the root of your project (or export EBAYSUDS_SANDBOX_CONFIG_PATH=<path to conf> in your shell) if you want to use the ebay api sandbox

That's it. Well, you need to read the docs (eg here's the Trading API) to see how to make the calls you want. The suds docs can also be useful to understand how to pass certain args.

All of the API classes take a sandbox kwarg. This is mostly only useful on the Trading API where your calls can have real effects! This will cause ebaysuds to use your sandbox conf file and the eBay sandbox API endpoints.

from ebaysuds import TradingAPI
client = TradingAPI(sandbox=True)
client.GetItem(ItemID="321021906488")

A spot of pruning

So yeah, you probably noticed it's really slow to initialise that client the first time?

Behind the scenes we're downloading a 5.3MB XML file and parsing it into Python objects. Hmm, SOAP doesn't seem so hot now? Well it's mitigated partly by telling Suds to cache the WSDL (and parsed Python objects).

But eBay also recognise the problem and provide:

WSDL Pruner Tool: Lets you prune a bulky WSDL down to the operations that you want to use

Go ahead, download it. Yes it's a lovely Java jar file. It comes with some rudimentary docs explaining how to launch the thing, which is a simple GUI app allowing you to save a new WSDL with just the methods you want to use.

A single-method WSDL (the ones I tried) still comes out about 1.6MB(!) but a lot of that is documentation text and XML overhead, so probably a lot less Python objects than if you have all 160 methods.

Suds expects a URL for the WSDL, but it can be a file one, eg: client = TradingAPI("file:///home/me/project/pruned.wsdl")

If you fancy pruning WSDLs programmatically there's a handy easter egg in the pruner.jar ...an actual command line script! To use it:

$ cd <path_to_pruner>
$ wget http://developer.ebay.com/webservices/latest/ebaySvc.wsdl
$ java -classpath pruner.jar com.ebay.ecsp.tools.PrunerUtil -wsdl ebaySvc.wsdl -out pruned.wsdl -oplist GetItem,SetNotificationPreferences,etc