question

as far as I know: the "inventory concept" is more related to your business logic than a decision between XML or rest. when working with an inventory, you are no longer in control of your items. you do no longer create items. you only work with an "inventory" and eBay automatically creates itemid for you based on your inventory. and you cannot have a mix of both. if an eBay account has switched to inventory, you no longer work with "AddItem" or "ReviseItem" - if I am not wrong, that´s what I remember. and with that big concept change in mind, you should take your decision very seriously ;)

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply.
The thing is... its easier for devs to work with JSONs than with XML due to direct compatibility between JSON and data structures in any programming language. So, we would prefer JSON for the sole purpose of overall faster application development time.

However, using the new inventory API introduces many new concepts in the workflow to create new items.
https://developer.ebay.com/api-docs/sell/static/inventory/inventory-item-to-offer.html#Creating
I am wondering if adding these additional steps to list items would seem worth for small sellers who do not use the concept of warehouse, click n collect, etc., which are some of the features available only in inventory API.

It looks like the new inventory API is not just another way of listing items, rather, a completely different approach to create items. Calling it as a "replacement" or an "upgrade" to the existing XML based calls in trading API is not right.

We are quite well versed with the xml based calls since we have been building apps with them for years. Never used the new inventory API calls before.
Just wondering if you have used both and which one you would you would advise us to use.

hi,

no, i never had to deal with that.
it´s funny because i have big customers and my application is managing >1 million items and I cannot count how often someone from ebay told me "hey, would be much easier if you would use an inventory". but we are doing a lot crazy stuff and need 1000% control over our items, so to this day I have therefore never seriously considered switching here. i wouldn´t say the inventory makes only sense for large customers, it really depends on the business. i cannot tell from experience here.
having only one itemid for one product - for instance - is something that does not work for most customers, for others, it´s absolutely fine. if you have to deal with variant items: I was told, this is much much easier within the inventory API. i have to deal with that shit and multi-variant-items is pure horror with the trading-api, as you might know.

so again: switching from trading to inventory because of the data format is the absolute wrong way of looking into this. if you need full control over your items, I wouldn't switch to inventory. but it really depends, if you can live with the downsides - of course, you get a lot of benefits from the inventory.

but for my business, I rather deal with the bad stuff and still have full control over everything.

all I say: don´t make this a question based on "how the data looks" - try to weigh up whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages ;)

and: u always have to consider: if u have multiple customers and some don´t want inventory and others want - you have to deal inside your own app with two different concepts at once - for me personally, a horror ;)

hi.. thanks a lot for the reply. We have been spending all our time researching on this API and can now see why ebay has introduced this - they wanna "amazonify" ebay sooner than later.. introduce warehouse concepts... but the main reason we feel they introduced this concept of separating inventory & listing is to work well as omni channel softwares..

What did you mean when you said you need 1000% control over the items? Were you referring to the ease with which you can revise an item using traditional API where just the item id alone is the primary key? Unlike inventory API where you need a bunch of handles (which are invisible on the frontend).

Why do you say control is less with the new API?

So far, I can only see one advantage of using the new API - when we create variation items.. its v easy with JSON which otherwise was almost a nightmare with XML.

If our customers say they want to use traditional API, we are screwed :)
I can only hope they wont ask!

Is your product publicly available or is it for a particular client?

my application is not public, it's created over years based on the customer's needs. I am sorry I cannot explain everything you asked for, when it comes to "control", I am only throwing some half knowledge into the room, things that were told me in the past, I was never able to verify, because I was too afraid making this big switch to this "amazon" like concept, as u described it :) because I had to deal with variants in the last weeks, I took another look into the inventory concept, because a ebay employee told me, that variants are much much easier to handle there - sadly, our application is way to complex at the moment to make an easy switch here. but if you have to deal a lot with variants, the inventory concept comes way more into focus and can do things way more easy, so that's a big plus here.

Interesting.. Thanks for all your help.
And wish us luck with the tool we're working on :)
In a month or two, we'll either be pleased that it's well-built, or we'll be ripping our hair out... lol