Developers and affiliates who use eBay’s API to help attract shoppers received a reminder from eBay last week. On February 28th, eBay is shutting down several calls within the Shopping API.
Certain “finding” calls will cease to work as of February 28, 2015, and, it warned, there is no guarantee those calls would continue to return results after January 31, 2015. The Finding API calls include FindItems, FindItemsAdvanced, FindProducts – item retrieval functionality only. For the latter call, eBay suggested developers migrate to the FindingAPI and using the findItemsByProduct call instead, which searches for items on eBay using specific eBay product values.
The calls were officially deprecated in 2011, but eBay extended the original timeframe to give its partners additional time.
eBay’s affiliate program explained to its members, “the Shopping API is built on one of our legacy systems and as such, publishers should expect that further calls may be deprecated in the future.”