Pushrod

As you may have heard, started from April 1, eBay is phasing out its old affiliate schemes in favour of it’s own home-grown one.

I won’t go here into discussing the pros and cons of the change (for Autopendium, the classic car website I run, on balance it’s probably good, if only from an admin point of view), but I did think it’s worth mentioning how how to update your config file for ebay-shopping, the rails library I wrote for the eBay Shopping API.

Step 1: Update your ebay.yml file with the new settings

:production:
  :app_id: "your_api_app_id_code" # this doesn't change
  :affiliate_partner: "9"  # this is to signify you are using
eBay's own affiliate scheme and afer the end of April will
be the only working choice
  :affiliate_id:  "your_new_ebay_affiliate_code" # This is the
new affiliate code from eBay, and is also called a CampaignId
  :affiliate_shopper_id: "my_campaign" # Doesn't need to change

The CampaignID is the only tricky bit, as eBay sometime also refers to is as CampID and Tracking Partner ID. Once you’ve signed up for the affiliate scheme, click on the Campaigns tab to find it (you can actually have more than one campaign and hence more than one CampaignID).

Step 2: Restart your server. Er, that’s it.