Printify Published to eBay Edit Post Error | Workaround Fix

At the beginning of this year, I started tinkering with Print on Demand. I used both Printify and Printful as Print on Demand suppliers/manufacturers. At the height of the pandemic, Printful’s production times started to suffer as jobs got pushed back past a month. That was when I fully switched to Printify.

I had shirts listed on eBay, Etsy, and my own website. My designs weren’t exactly flying off the shelf until recently. Since my products were on multiple storefronts, I was manually entering my orders. Eventually, manual orders got out of hand and I needed to set up integration for auto-order processing. Meaning I wanted my customer’s orders to go directly to Printify and any order updates to go back to my customer withouy my involvement.

the Printify / eBay error:

When a product is added on Printfiy and then published to eBay, eBay limits modifications of the eBay listing. It’s restricted to only allow editing from the Printify side.

As you can imagine, when one side limits you, there will be problems.

There are very little editing options from the Printify side which lead to the following problems that affects my ad listing.

• The character limit on the Printify side is much smaller than the eBay side.
• You cannot add additional product images. e.g. if your design is very small on your mockup, your customer will not be able to see the design. The best option would be to add a full-sized image of the design to your listing.
• You cannot modify the ad rates, discounts, shipping/handling, etc

You’ll likely see this error when trying to save any modifications of your eBay ad listing:

It looks like there’s a problem with this listing.
Inventory-based listing management is not currently supported by this tool. Please refer to the tool used to create this listing.

So with limited editing on Printify and no editing on eBay, you’re left with a crappy listing.

I contacted eBay and Printify and their support was useless. Of course both gave me the run around and both blamed each other.

Apparently this is not a common issue for a permanent fix to be in place?

I discovered a Workaround

1. Create your product on the Printify side. Ignore the description and publish to eBay.
2. Once publishing is completed, on the eBay side, go to My Ebay > Selling (you’ll see all your listed items for sale)
3. On your newly published eBay listing, click on “Sell Similar.” This basically clones the ad for you.
4. Add whatever images and description you like. You have full control over the eBay listing as you would normally.
5. Complete your changes and save the listing
6. Go back to My Ebay > Selling and under the original published listing(from Printify), click on More actions > end listing. (Make sure to remove the correct one!)

So I’ve tested this and it works. Basically, you’re cloning the ad listing and it removes the eBay editing limitations. Once a buyer orders your product, it is automatically pushed the order to Printify. Processing depends on your Prinitfy settings. Once the order has an update, the notice is pushed out from Printify to your eBay customer. Voila! Hands off selling!

It was an accidental discovery that actually costed me a double order at my expense. But now I can edit my ad and sync works so I guess it was worth the price paid.

Happy selling!