How to Exclude Shipping Locations on eBay

The eBay developer program will roll out a new version for its Trading API, which will give developers incorporating eBay services the possibility to exclude users coming from a specific country and bidding on a product. The exclusion is achieved through settings done to the list of allowed shipping locations. These changes are going to be incorporated in version 635, expected to be launched on the 16th of September, 2009.


The principle behind this new feature is simple. If a person selling an object through eBay on their own website, using eBay's Trading API, wants to exclude users coming from certain countries where they cannot ship their products in safe conditions or in time, they can enter their My eBay developer page and simply create a global Ship To Exclusion List.

Whenever a user from that country will want to acquire a product, they will find it impossible to place a bid for that object. The same error message will appear if the user has omitted to configure their primary “Ship to Location” setting, which the API will inspect to determine if it excludes the user or not.

If multiple configurations need to be done when building several websites on the same developer account, the programmer can simply override their default exclude locations inside their item-listing calls, with the aid of the ExcludeShipToLocation fields.

These fields can be used with ISO country short codes to specify countries where the website will not be able to ship the product. Including such a field in an “AddItem” family call on a website will ignore the standard exclusion list recorded in the My eBay account.

Here is a simple example provided by eBay developer Kelly Rich on eBay's developer service blog:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CODE
<ShippingDetails>
<ExcludeShipToLocation>FR</ExcludeShipToLocation>
<ExcludeShipToLocation>IT</ExcludeShipToLocation>
</ShippingDetails>
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Also, when wanting to cancel a list configured on the My eBay page, the developer can use the “NONE” attribute to let the website users know that it can ship to any location. Here is another example:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CODE
<ShippingDetails>
<ExcludeShipToLocation>NONE</ExcludeShipToLocation>
</ShippingDetails>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

User preferences previously set in the My eBay account can be reviewed using this short snippet:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CODE
<GetUserPreferencesRequest xmlns="urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents">
<ShowSellerExcludeShipToLocationPreference> true
</ShowSellerExcludeShipToLocationPreference>
</GetUserPreferencesRequest>
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