ebay_find_active_items
Search active eBay listings marketplace-wide with keyword filters for price, condition, category, and buying option. Paginate and sort results for precise item discovery.
Instructions
Search active eBay listings marketplace-wide (not the seller's own inventory). Uses the Buy Browse API item_summary/search with the application access token eBay requires for Browse, minted from client credentials under the basic api_scope. Supports pagination (limit/offset), sort (price, -price, newlyListed, endingSoonest), category restriction, and condition/buying-option/price filters plus a raw Browse filter passthrough. eBay documents that a search without a buying-option filter returns only listings that still offer FIXED_PRICE, so pass buyingOptions: ["AUCTION"] (or ["AUCTION", "FIXED_PRICE"] for both) to be sure of reaching auctions that have taken a bid. Returns cleaned summaries: itemId (feed into ebay_get_item_details), title, price (an auction's current bid when there is no fixed price, with bidCount), condition, buyingOptions, seller and feedback, first advertised shipping cost, auction end date, and listing URL. hasNext is the authoritative pagination signal, derived from the next link in eBay's paged-collection response: page forward by advancing offset in whole limit-sized steps while hasNext is true, and stop as soon as it is false. Neither total nor a short page is a pagination signal — total is eBay's match count for the query and in live testing came back as 0 once offset ran past the available result window, and a page can hold fewer items than limit without being the last one. The active-listing counterpart of ebay_find_completed_items.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| sort | No | Sort order: "price" (asc, price+shipping), "-price" (desc), "newlyListed", or "endingSoonest". Omit for best-match relevance. | |
| limit | No | Maximum items to return (1–200). Defaults to 20. | |
| query | Yes | Search keywords for active listings (e.g. "iphone 14 pro 256") | |
| filter | No | Raw Browse filter expression appended to the generated filters for advanced cases (e.g. "sellers:{user1|user2}"). | |
| offset | No | Zero-based result offset for pagination. Must be zero or a multiple of limit (eBay pages in whole limit-sized steps). Defaults to 0. | |
| priceMax | No | Maximum price (inclusive). | |
| priceMin | No | Minimum price (inclusive). | |
| conditions | No | Condition filters, e.g. ["NEW"], ["USED"], ["CERTIFIED_REFURBISHED"]. | |
| categoryIds | No | Comma-separated eBay category ids to restrict the search (e.g. "9355"). | |
| buyingOptions | No | Buying option filters, e.g. ["FIXED_PRICE"], ["AUCTION"], ["BEST_OFFER"]. eBay documents that a search without this filter returns only listings that still offer FIXED_PRICE, and an auction loses that option once it takes a qualifying bid, so pass ["AUCTION"] (or ["AUCTION", "FIXED_PRICE"] for both) to be sure of reaching auctions. | |
| priceCurrency | No | Currency for priceMin/priceMax as a 3-letter code (e.g. "USD", "EUR"). Defaults to USD when a bound is set. eBay converts across currencies, but silently drops the entire price filter when the code is not one it recognises: an unsupported code returns unfiltered results rather than an error. |