Countdown API
DATA · DATA & ANALYTICS
eBay listings, search results, and batch jobs run on their own key.
Connecting Countdown API in practice
Requests are charged as credits against a monthly plan allowance, and the two failures that matter arrive as 402 when credits run out and 503 during an eBay parsing incident — the 503 carries a retry_after and is explicitly not billed. A 429 only exists if the plan happens to have a rate limit at all.
Rate limits
- Credits per month per plan, reported by GET /account as credits_used, credits_limit, credits_remaining and credits_reset_at; calls to the Account API are free.
- One credit per request, and two credits when skip_gtin_cache=true is used to bypass the stale GTIN mapping.
- Collections enqueue up to 15,000 requests each, run manually or on a schedule, and execute concurrently on Countdown API infrastructure.
- Accounts also carry separate collections and destinations ceilings, plus an overage limit that is charged against the account balance when overage is enabled.
- 429 is returned only on plans that have a rate limit, or on endpoints that are individually rate limited.
Worth knowing
- 402 Payment Required means out of credits or a payment problem — it is a billing state, not an authentication one, and 401 is the invalid key.
- During a parsing incident a whole request type returns 503 with a message and a retry_after (the example is 3600 seconds) and is not charged; skip_on_incident lets an automated caller opt out of receiving partial data instead.
- The API key travels as an api_key query parameter, so it appears in any proxy or access log that records full URLs.
- This is the eBay member of the Traject Data family and shares its documentation shell with the Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot products, so it is easy to land on the wrong API reference for the same-looking endpoint.
Checked against eBay Product Data API overview (2026-09-29), Countdown API response codes (2026-09-29), Countdown Account API (2026-09-29)
What an agent can do
Each action is granted on its own. An agent allowed to read is not thereby allowed to write, and the scope beside each row is what the acting user must have connected for it to run at all.
Often connected alongside
Put Countdown API behind one governed endpoint.
Same permissions, same audit trail, whatever else you connect next.