eBay sellers on the dedicated platforms in United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain will enjoy a new and more user-friendly order number format starting July 2019.

What’s changing is that eBay will attach the updated order numbers to each transaction, which will follow the transactions through their entire life cycles. The updated order numbers will appear in the “order details” section of your View Order Details page, Seller Hub, reports, emails, APIs, post-transaction records, and other locations over time, so you can efficiently track and manage your orders. This unique identifier for each order will be used for managed and non-managed payments.

What you need to know is that these user-friendly order numbers will help sellers track and trace orders for easier reconciliation. Also, they will help buyers track their order information. eBay will also provide better customer support for buyers and sellers.

In order to use this new feature, eBay will support the updated order number format in the new version of their APIs and continue to support order numbers in their current API for backward compatibility.

What does this mean to those who use an order management system?

Sellers and developers will need to tweak their API calls in order to get the new order format and align with details that will be displayed in the user experience. You will see the same information in both the user experience and new version of the API that buyers see on their email receipts and in other user experience flows.

At the moment, the eBay order number is created depending on a few factors: whether the order is a single line item or multiple line (variation)  item order and whether the order is a fixed-price listing or an auction listing.

For a single line item order, the eBay order number is a mix of the eBay Item ID and also the Transaction ID. When the items purchased have come from a fixed-price listing, it appears with a hyphen in between the two values: ex. 121124971073-1094989827002. For a single line item order for an auction listing, it appears as follows: 121124971074-1.

For multiple line item orders, eBay creates a unique order number that accommodates for the multiple items within the order – it’s essentially a number to account for the “Combined Payment” of multiple items. This usually appears as a single order string with no hyphen: e.g. 398348555

You will be able to use the new order number format using JustShipIT as soon as eBay will make the necessary updates to their API. JustShipIT is the order management system that is always kept up to date with the latest trends and features available on most eCommerce platforms.