While developing a database to manage my household inventory, I started to implement a category and subcategory sorting feature. I figured that since a lot of my items will end up being listed on eBay (or otherwise), it might make sense to categorize my items when I entered them. Of course, eBay has a fairly expansive category system, and I didn’t quite need that level of granularity for my home possessions. So I imported the first two levels of categories into an Excel spreadsheet.
Database developers creating categories for sorting inventories might find this useful so that they don’t need to re-invent the wheel. If there is sufficient demand, I may recreate these files and include third and fourth level deep categories.
Without further ado, in Microsoft Excel and CSV format, the eBay category list and eBay subcategory list:
The first column is the numeric category or subcategory ID. The second column is the category name. The third column, if available, is the subcategory name. Note that eBay motors has no inherent numerical ID, so I replaced the eBay motors category ID with 0, and the subcategories with unique numbers starting at 999990.
12 responses so far ↓
1 Johnny // Jun 10, 2007 at 11:36 am
Thanks, very useful.
2 Jean // Sep 9, 2007 at 12:59 am
Thanks. This helped a great deal.
3 kps // Nov 15, 2007 at 3:01 am
Cheers for that, I’m looking at a similar thing myself. Although like you not as extensive as eBay’s.
4 Chris Dillon // Jan 13, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Check out my eBay category selector:
http://www.bansfans.com/cats/
5 Steve // Mar 18, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Much appreciated, I’m looking to be able to map all category IDs to category names so that I can do a client side lookup from ID to name without the need for using lots of time consuming API calls. So the 3rd & 4th categories would be very helpful to me (presumably there is no 5th?) Assume that this would just be for eBay.com and not the other international sites? Many thanks, Steve
6 Sam // Oct 9, 2008 at 6:18 am
How should I go about getting Level 3 and 4 of the ebay categories? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
7 Tim // Aug 3, 2009 at 2:54 pm
You can view all current categories and ID’s by going to the following; (Then select ‘Show category numbers).
http://listings.ebay.com/
8 William // Nov 7, 2009 at 9:57 am
Like the files – I think the categories is still up to date (i.e. still 34 categories) but the first level sub-categories needs updating. Thanks anyway!
9 Jake // Oct 8, 2010 at 10:18 am
Thank you! This is a time saver. It is no longer totally up to date but it does nicely for my purposes.
10 Alex // Dec 28, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Is this only for the eBay US?
Each eBay site has its own category list and sub-categories can go 6 levels deep. Each category has an ID and if the site isn’t english then you may want a translation.
An Uber list is here: http://alexharvey.eu/etc/ebay/list-of-ebay-categories/
Covers each territory that eBay pays commissions and has an english translation for ALL non-english categories.
Updated weekly!
Alex
[Editor’s reply: this actually seemed to be a quite useful resource when I checked it out. If anyone else has a counterpoint, please share.]
11 Keys // Apr 1, 2011 at 11:47 am
Thanks for the files. I couldn’t find the ID’s because of eBay’s new layout. I am tweaking a couple widgets and needed this bad.
12 Gary // Nov 15, 2011 at 5:41 pm
Thanks for sharing these categories. Just what I was looking for.
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