eBay affiliates, can we display the full description of an item?

Does anyone know if we are allowed to display the full description of an eBay item on our sites? Or are we just allowed to show the titles.

 

There should be no reason that you couldn't display the full description, but you should refer to the current API docs to be sure.

The full description for items is usually full blown HTML, so if you want to -- I guess that there's nothing to keep you from displaying it.

For my needs, I get the descriptions (using GetItem request including the detail level: <DetailLevel>ItemReturnDescription</DetailLevel>) - and then I strip out all of the javascript and style and all other tags before I store it in my database for search needs. I never really use that to display though, so it can be unformatted for my needs.

You may need to strip out at least some of the code - depending on where you want to contain it (on a web page, inside a compiled client application?).

I hope that this answers your question.

 

Ya I know you can get the data with the API but are you allowed to display it on your site.

I can't get a straight answer from eBay, took them over a month to respond and I still don't know.

 

Hey -- I found your answer in their Technical Questions: eBay Trading Web Services forums:
Display Item Description
I had to explicitly search "All" dates rather than just last 90 days

Since the question was pretty clear - and the response doesn't indicate that you can't display the data it all looks like a "go" to me.

This is not considered "private" information in my opinion, and it comes back with the requests - why else would you be able to retrieve it?

I'd like to see how your code progresses - and I'd still be happy to help with some questions if I can.

 

Ya, I posted a question on their forum a while ago, will see if I get a response.

Maybe theres some kind of copyright stuff associated with it, I just want to be sure.

I don't want eBay to kick me out if the see it, I wonder if they give a warning before booting someone.


I'll rep you for effort

 

You surely can display the auction description. Why did you think you could not?

 

Copyright issues, like images within the descriptions for example.

 

This is what I asked "ebay" through cj.com which took a month to receive a response.

Question:

"I want to add a feature where visitors can see the item description, the long description that sellers enter, on my affiliate site. This would involve the description being pulled via eBay API, and then, cached in a database to be reused next time someone views that particular item.

I checked the Terms & Conditions and noticed some copyright points but I'm not quite sure how those would apply to my idea of displaying/catching the descriptions."


Response

"Unfortunately, this is not within the eBay affiliate T &C's. Thank you for checking with us, please make the appropriate note not to do so within your account."



I'm not sure if both are not allowed or just one, or if they just wanted to get rid of me and copy/pasted something not giving a damn.