Templates and recipes

A listing needs more than a title and a price. It needs shipping terms, return terms, a category, a condition and a package weight. ListSwiftly keeps those as reusable pieces, so you don’t have to retype them on every product.

For which templates prevent which preflight refusals, see Set up for your first listing.

Templates

A template is one saved set of answers. There are six kinds:

• Category: a fallback category, a default condition, and default item specifics.
• Payment & Return: your payment terms, and your return window and terms.
• Title & Description: patterns for building a title and description. Use placeholders such as {{title}}, {{sku}}, {{brand}} and {{category}}.
• Shipping: handling time, shipping services, flat-rate or calculated cost, and any excluded regions.
• Pricing: a rule applied to the product’s base price, such as a markup, a multiplier or a fixed price, with optional rounding.
• Package: weight and dimensions for the item itself.

Package is different from the other five. The other five describe the listing: its title, its price, its terms. Package describes the item: how much it weighs and how big it is. So it’s saved onto the product, not the listing. It fills in a weight only for a product that doesn’t have one yet, and only when a listing is created from the recipe or the recipe is applied to a draft. A listing that already exists isn’t changed. See Package and weight.

ListSwiftly stores your shipping and return terms, never an eBay policy ID. You can’t know your own fulfillmentPolicyId, and eBay only accepts IDs at publish time. When you publish, ListSwiftly turns your terms into a real eBay business policy for that channel account automatically. If your terms can’t be turned into a valid policy, the publish fails and the listing is marked with an error. ListSwiftly doesn’t quietly fall back to whatever policy the account already had: a listing under terms you didn’t choose is worse than a listing that didn’t go out.

Recipes

A recipe bundles one template of each kind into a single set of defaults you can name, such as “Trading cards” or “Vinyl”. When you publish or cross-list a product, ListSwiftly applies a recipe to fill in whatever the product doesn’t already say.

The default recipe

Each channel (eBay, Mercari) has one default recipe. A publish that doesn’t name a recipe uses it. The default is:

• the recipe marked Default recipe for that channel, or
• if you have only one recipe for that channel, that one.

If you have two or more recipes for a channel and none of them is marked default, ListSwiftly won’t pick one for you. A publish then gets no recipe at all, and on eBay that means no shipping or return terms.

When you cross-list to more than one channel at once, each channel uses its own default recipe. A recipe that belongs to eBay only fills in eBay’s fields, and Mercari still gets its own default rather than nothing.

Connecting a channel for the first time creates a starter recipe automatically. It has a title pattern that uses the product’s own title and a pricing rule that keeps your own price. Shipping and return terms are left empty on purpose (see Connect eBay for what happens next), and so are the description pattern, the category and the package.

What wins: the product or the recipe

A recipe never silently overrides what the product says:

• Description: a description pattern fills in only a product with no description. The exception is a pattern that contains {{description}}, which wraps the product’s own description, for example to add a footer.
• Condition and item specifics: the category template’s values are defaults. The product’s own values win, and a value set on the listing itself wins over both.
• Category: the recipe’s category is the last resort. The product’s own eBay category comes first and, for Mercari, the confident match worked out from it. The recipe’s category is used only when neither gives an answer.
• Package weight: a weight already on the product is never overwritten.
• Shipping and return terms, in order: a recipe you pick for this publish, then the terms of the eBay listing a product was created from, then the channel’s default recipe.

Where a recipe does replace something, preflight says so under the channel as a note, without blocking the publish.