Update your listings

Considerations

Not every field can be updated and this will vary whether the item had sales or not, and also remember your item must be active in order to be modified. You can modify the values for:

• Title
• Price
• Pictures
• Description*

*It's not possible modify, just add a post.

Also remember that:

• Category can’t be modified via API.
• Listing type can be modified only once.

Update your item

Let’s see a basic example of updating an item title and price. The only thing you need is the item_id of the listed product and of course, the seller’s access_token.

Example:

curl -X PUT -H 'Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json" -d
{
  "title": "Your new title",
  "price": 1000
}
https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/ITEM_ID

Nice, your item title and price has been updated and you should receive a code 200 OK response status to know everything went well. Keep in mind that it can take some time until you see the item’s information refreshed.

Descriptions

It’s very easy to update a description, and is something you can do whether the item has bids or not, but since there are some considerations you need to keep when adding or replacing descriptions, check our descriptions article to make sure you get it right.

Pictures

You can always add or replace item pictures, refer to our working with pictures tutorial to know the best way to get through it.

Listing types

When you want more exposition on your item you need to make a listing type upgrade. Know the details and considerations and learn how to achieve an upgrade on our Listing types and Upgrades tutorial.

Changing listing status

Any item listed on our marketplace can hold different status, check the following description of each one:

• closed: finalizes your publication. Once closed, it cannot be reactivated again, but it can be relisted.
• paused: pauses your publication. Once paused, it will not be visible to other Mercado Libre’s users, but it will not be closed and it can be reactivated later on.
• active: reactivates a previously paused item.

If you need to make any changes on the item status, you need to send any of these values for the “status” field, note the value is case sensitive and must be sent in lowercase.

Follow the example to pause an active item:

curl -X PUT -H 'Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json" -d
{
  "status":"paused"
}
https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/ITEM_ID

Excellent! Your item has been paused. Now you can try to activate it again by making the exact same call sending “active” instead of “paused” as the status value. If your item is currently closed and your intention is to relist it, check our relist article to achieve it right away.

Delete listing

Deleting a listing has no way back, so be careful when you call this action. Also note that there’s no need to delete closed items since they’ll be discarded automatically after some time.

If you still need to delete an item, for example items in status: payment_required that won’t respond to ‘closed’ status, do as it follows.

First step:

curl -X PUT -H 'Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json" -d
{
"status": "closed"
}
https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/ITEM_ID

Second step:

curl -X PUT -H 'Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json" -d
  {
  "deleted":"true"
  }
  https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/ITEM_ID

That’s it! Your item should be removed.

Stock update

Updating the stock of a product is very easy. You only have to update the value of the "available_quantity" field.

Example:

curl -X PUT -H 'Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Accept: application/json" -d
  {
    "available_quantity": 6
  }
  https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/ITEM_ID

Easy. You can check your publication and see the updated stock.

Next: Manage contacts & visits.