What are eBay Seller Profiles?

As an eBay seller, you can create Seller Profiles in your eBay account which can then be applied to any number if listings. These are not related to Listing Profiles in WP-Lister - but you can use your existing eBay seller profiles in your listing profile.

There are different types of seller profiles:

• Shipping Profiles
• Shipping Discount Profiles
• Payment Profiles
• Return Profiles

Let's explain how profiles work by looking at shipping profiles as an example.

How Shipping Profiles work

Usually, eBay shipping options and fees are set the same way as you can see on the edit product and profile pages: You select a number of shipping methods, both for domestic and international shipping, and for each of these shipping methods you can enter a fee for the first item and for additional items. Regarding international shipping options, you can set a destination for each method - and on top of that set a list of locations where you ship to and where you do not ship to. This is about all the information that can be sent via the eBay API when listing or revising an item from within WP-Lister.

Now, you could for example have a shipping method for Worldwide, but still limit the actual countries by adding countries you do not want to ship to like Antarctica to the Exclude locations list. But you could not change the fee for a particular country this way: Let's say you ship to Europe, but want the fee for Italy to be less than the other countries. You would have to add another shipping method to do so - and they are limited to 5.

This might sound confusing so far, because on ebay.com you can actually set a special shipping fee for selected countries - but when you do so, this information is not stored with the listing item itself. Instead, what happens is that eBay will automatically create a shipping profile or shipping discount profile for you - which works kind of an "extra set of shipping rules" that are applied on top of what is set for the actual item.

Seller Account vs Private Account

If you have an actual seller account on eBay, you should be able to edit those shipping profiles directly in your eBay account - and you'd be able to select and apply those predefined shipping profiles in WP-Lister as well. 

But even if you don't have a seller account (or don't have this feature enabled), eBay will still automatically create those shipping profiles for you - which might result in the quite "messy" list of available profiles. In this case, you should upgrade your eBay account if you want to use shipping profiles or any other seller profiles in WP-Lister.