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Published: November 14 2011, 8:32:00 AMUpdated: August 22 2022, 3:19:02 PM

What are the recommended best practices for retrieving eBay fees for item and orders?

To retrieve the fee that eBay charges to its sellers, you can use the following strategies depending on what charges you want to retrieve.

1. To retrieve Final Value Fees (FVF)

Use the GetOrders  call from Trading API to get the Final Value Fee for an item. Final Values Fee(FVF) is what eBay charges a seller for each transaction. This fee is generated as soon as the transaction is created. In order to retrieve FVF for an item, you need to set the <IncludeFinalValueFee> flag to true in the GetOrders request.

ex:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<GetOrdersRequest xmlns="urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents">
  <RequesterCredentials>
    <eBayAuthToken>ABC...123</eBayAuthToken>
  </RequesterCredentials>
  <CreateTimeFrom>2007-12-01T20:34:44.000Z</CreateTimeFrom>
  <CreateTimeTo>2007-12-10T20:34:44.000Z</CreateTimeTo>
  <OrderRole>Seller</OrderRole>
  <OrderStatus>Active</OrderStatus>
  <IncludeFinalValueFee>true</IncludeFinalValueFee>
</GetOrdersRequest>

This will return the FinalValueFee  field in the Transaction Container in the response.

2. Determine all fees that are applied to an account

There are two options here.

2.a FeeSettlementReport.

eBay Provides a downloadable report that's generated every month for the user on the date depending on the billing cycle. This is most favored approach for High Volume sellers. There is a one-time set-up process involved for this which is discussed in this article.

LMS: FeeSettlementReport one time set-up process

Once the setup is done, you will have the report ready for download within specific dates depending on the seller's billing cycle (Available in the GetAccount Response). Please refer the FeeSettlementReport FAQ to know more about it.

2.b GetAccount API call

The GetAccount call will retrieve all the fees that are charged to an account.  The API call supports different filters like BeginDate, EndDate and also supports Pagination.

Please note that this call might fail with an internal server error if the seller has large number of records. This is a known limitation as noted here. If you are just looking for Final Value Fee, its better to use GetOrders .

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