3. Using eBay With CCJ Channels
Learning how to effectively sell on eBay is a large topic, and this manual can't cover it in great detail. We can only give some general concepts, and get into details about the specific issues that concern how you will use CCJ Channels specifically.
CCJ Channels will create Fixed-Price listings (not auctions) with a GTC (good till canceled) duration. The component does not (yet) sync your orders or inventory with eBay, so you'll need to manage your qty appropriately yourself. CCJ Channels does not create multi-category or variation listings.
3.1 Setting Up Your eBay Account
CCJ Channels is used to connect with an existing eBay account. If you don't already have an eBay account, you will need to set one up before you can use the component.
After you've set up your eBay account in general, you will also need to set it up as a seller account (all eBay accounts can buy items, but additional setup is needed to sell things). If you haven't set up your account as a seller account yet, when you try to list an item you will get an error from eBay that says "Before you can list this item we need some additional information to create a seller's account".
The easiest way to do this additional setup is to log in to your account on the eBay website, and try to sell an item. eBay will walk you through a listing-creation form; you can just make up a fake item and set whatever attributes you want for it. When you get to the end there's a big "List item" button, and when you click it, it will pop up some dialogs that you can fill out to finish making your account into a seller account (it will ask for a way to contact you, and for a way that you're going to pay your seller fees). Once you fill those out and submit them, it'll go back to the listing-creation form again, and it hasn't actually submitted it to create a listing yet. At this point you can just throw it away, because your account is now set up as a seller account.
In recent years, eBay has been moving toward what it calls its "Catalog" listings. The eBay Catalog is a set of known products for which eBay has a great deal of information, and when you create a listing to sell one of those products you can take advantage of all this information. For example, if you are selling an iPhone 6, eBay knows a lot about iPhone 6 and so when you list one eBay can extend your listing with a lot of additional information about the product that you don't have to provide.
In addition, eBay will display catalog items in a different aggregated listing format so that buyers can more easily compare offers from different sellers. This page from eBay tells you a lot more details about how it works, but it's not yet available in all categories.
You can take advantage of the eBay catalog to provide a lot of information for you automatically, but you have to make sure eBay knows your product "matches" something in the Catalog by providing either the UPC or the MPN and Manufacturer. If you do this and your product successfully matches the catalog, you won't need to provide a category or "Item Specifics" and you may not need to provide images (non-new items still require images). Some categories actually require that you match a product in the catalog or you can't list your item.
If your product does not match a catalog item, you'll have to provide a category (either set specifically in the item, or using the default category set in the component options) and at least one image. Some categories also require "Item Specifics" that are not used in other categories (for example, clothing categories usually require a "Size" Item Specific). "Item Specifics" is eBay's term for named attributes. If you try to list your product and get error messages about Item Specifics, you can add them to your listings by editing the CCJ Channels product.
3.3 Using the "Push to eBay" Page
The "Push to eBay" page is where you'll actually manage your listings. When you display this page, it shows your list of products along with a subset of the information about them. If a product has an existing eBay listing, the eBay ID is displayed in one column, and this is also a link you can click to show your listing on the eBay site.
It's important to understand that changes you make to products in CCJ Channels are not automatically or immediately made to the corresponding eBay listing. Once you make changes in CCJ Channels (such as changing a price, editing a description, de-listing an item, etc), the changes to that item need to be "pushed" to eBay - hence the name of this page. On this page, any items that have been edited and therefore need to be pushed are displayed in bold, and an icon is displayed in the rightmost column.
In the top toolbar, the "Push Updates" button will push all the pending updates (i.e. all the boldface items) to eBay. The items are pushed a few at a time so as not to overwhelm your site or the eBay servers. While the push is in progress you'll see a typical "rolling-arrows" icon showing you that it's in progress, and when it's completed that icon will be replaced with the results of the push for that item (usually "Success", but sometimes you'll see various errors from eBay).
Many of these error messages are fairly self-explanatory, but if you don't understand a message then doing a web search is often helpful, or you can ask us for support.
If you want to just push a particular item or set of items (instead of pushing all the pending updates), then choose the left-column checkbox for the items you want and click the "Push Selected" toolbar button.