eBay Selling Manager Applications (Echo) Beta Platform is Now Available!

The Selling Manager Applications beta platform is now available for developers! Developers can embed seller tools directly on eBay.com, where hundreds of thousands of sellers manage their online businesses at my.ebay.com.

This opportunity will give developers the following benefits:

• Exposure to hundreds of thousands of professional sellers: Be listed in our applications directory, viewable from My eBay.
• Robust integration: Have your application be an integrated part of sellers' Selling Manager experience.
• Simplified billing: Focus on building great applications and eBay will manage subscription and billing.
• Enhanced access: Get access to a set of enhanced and exclusive seller-focused APIs.
• Make money: You choose how much to charge, whether a one-time fee or ongoing subscription.

Plus: Get On Board Now and Launch with us this Summer! We'll Waive Revenue Share Until 2010

This is the perfect time to get your app tested and ready for our launch of Selling Manager Applications to eBay sellers this summer.

Take a look at our documentation and participation requirements to find out more about this opportunity. Check out our samples to help you get started, and use our sandbox environment as you build your application. If you get your application ready for our launch to sellers later this summer, we'll waive your revenue share back to eBay until the start of 2010.

Find out more about the opportunity and how to get started!

- Delyn

eBay opens up SM Apps beta platform to gadget developers

eBay has always supported open standards for Web development. We have been an open API platform for over 8 years, but now that we've opened up Selling Manager as a beta platform for developers, we've chosen to embrace the gadgets specification as defined within OpenSocial. Using the concept of gadget containers, developers are able to take existing gadgets and re-mix and re-use them in innovative new ways across the Web.

Our platform architect, Farhang Kassaei spoke to Chris Schalk of the Google Code team at Web 2.0 Expo last week about eBay's decision to standardize our architecture for this platform to the OpenSocial gadgets specification. If you missed Farhang's session at Web 2.0 Expo with David Glazer, the Director of Engineering from Google, then make sure to check out Farhang's post on the OpenSocial blog or the video below.

Open standards allow developers to innovate more quickly across platforms, and that makes the Web better for everyone.

Enjoy the video! (click here if you don't see the video below)

-Delyn

Web 2.0 Keynotes: Mark Carges on Five Things That Matter for Developers Today

The keynotes were thoughtful and down to earth today at the Web 2.0 conference. The hall was packed, and you have never been in a room with so many iPhones in your life.

Mark Carges, eBay CTO and SVP of Global Platform, wrapped it all up with a short, hard-hitting closing keynote (viewable here) entitled "Five things that matter to developers today."

1. Making money

Of course. Since the first data-scraping and sniping tools... well, wait, make that since eBay first opened its APIs to developers, the eBay development ecosystem has grown with the volume of eBay transactions. eBay sellers sold $60B last year, and the 80,000 developers who helped sellers research, list, and service all those transactions also received their cut.

2. Useful technology

eBay has some of the greatest technology and data assets on the web.

The technology of eBay and PayPal is useful on a massive scale. PayPal has 70 million users. eBay sees 150 million unique visitors per month, and supports 70 million sellers worldwide.

The developer community that provides applications for eBay sellers and buyers uses the eBay APIs to drive as much as 30% of eBay transactions.

3. Accessible technology

Mark emphasized the importance of mobile applications.The eBay iPhone application is a strong start. It is clear that he believes eBay should make a powerful effort to enable mobile usage. eBay and its third-party developers still need to make some breakthroughs to enable accessibility.

4. Technology adapted to you

Today, your cell phone is a communications device, an entertainment center, a mall, and a social network. Tomorrow, it may also be your wallet. Already you can instantly repay a loan to a friend who has a PayPal account. Soon, In-N-Out Burgers may accept PayPal, and you will be able to pay for your burgers at the counter from your cell phone.

The big news in adaptable technology is that the PayPal Developer Program is opening up later in 2009. Third-party developers will use flexible APIs for sending money to create mobile payments applications that will change the way people pay for things.

5. Open platform

eBay released a new developer opportunity today. SM Apps lets developers embed seller applications in ebay.com, just as you can embed applications in Facebook. The difference is that with SM Apps developers can make money, charging a one-time fee or using a subscription model for use of their application.

Because the SM Apps platform uses the Gadgets specification, applications built for eBay can also operate elsewhere on the web, including on other portal pages.

The Selling Manager tool has 270,000 active, paying businesses operating in the U.S. alone. As Mark said,

While other platforms are trying to figure out monetization... we are set up for you [the developer] to take a cut, and we hope you will.

Gadgets Gone Commercial

Presenters: Farhang Kassaei, Platform Architect with eBay Inc., and David Glazer, Director of Engineering, Google Inc.

Wow, this presentation was well attended! First there was the big line to get in; then folks kept streaming in, filling the back and side of the room. This was certainly the topic of interest.

Farhang and David took turns delivering portions of the presentation. Farhang began with the opportunity: Over 270,000 eBay US sellers use Selling Manager to manage their eBay activities. These sellers want help. They are willing to pay for applications that help them manage and grow their businesses.

These sellers collectively do millions of dollars of GMV per year and sell in almost all vertical shopping markets. What are their needs? How can you help them?

A big benefit for developers in this new solution is that eBay helps market the developer's apps. Farhang gave special praise for the eBay managed billing platform aspect of this new developer opportunity: eBay handles the billing and payment processing, and your part as a developer, after initial signup, is to simply receive payment.

David dug into gadgets. Two years ago, several companies were looking at the opportunity to create social apps. Google wanted to help get more basic than that and establish the generic structure and mechanisms. And today we have gadgets, the extensibility technology underlying OpenSocial. "The gadget spec is agnostic--it doesn't care what you build on it."

MySpace built a social app on it to enable users to define characters for themselves. eBay built on it with a clear commerce focus.

Farhang added to the reasons that eBay chose to build Selling Manager Applications upon the gadget spec:

• So many developers have adopted the spec
• An active community makes easy access to knowledge and experience
• It isn't limited to social features; eBay could extend it to build commercial features
• And it is a good architectural fit, providing application infrastructure such as security, identity, config management, portable deployment and internationalization.

And Selling Manager applications can interact with the eBay APIs.

An audience member asked, "When you built this platform, what did you want to support?" Farhang was quick to say,

If I could tell you, this platform would not be as valuable. eBay has already seen plenty of useful apps around inbox management, post-transaction management, listing, shipping management...We hope people will develop apps we really do not expect.

A key design he highlighted: the eBay subscription protocol. In contrast to the Selling Manager application approach, consider the situation for the user who comes to some web page and is thinking about subscribing to try out the app. What if the user is redirected to some other site, an unfamiliar site, to continue signing up? That's a big reason for the user to back away from signing up further.

But the user who comes to eBay's Selling Manager Applications page remains in the familiar and trustable eBay space and has increased confidence to subscribe to the application to try it out. It just makes sense.

Anyone can register as an eBay developer and develop and test a Selling Manager application in the eBay Sandbox. If you are wanting to move your application to production, you submit an application for review of your application.

John Darrow
API Tech Docs and Tools

Announcing the Launch of Custom Item Specifics Phase 2

Item Specifics are a great way for Seller to complement their item title and description. In 2007 we launched Custom Item Specifics as a way to expand Item Specifics in to more categories and to give sellers more control over the item specifics that are shown in these categories.

In the next few days, we'll be releasing the second phase of Custom Item Specifics and testing the conversion of a couple of select leaf level categories from the eBay Item Specific platform over to the Custom Item Specifics platform.

Custom Item Specifics Phase 2 introduces some new types of metadata for individual tags including:

• Multi-valued tags
• Required tags
• Closed value list tags (where seller can only use values from a pre-defined enumerated set provide by eBay)
• Tags in dependency relationships (for ex. State and City)

In the next two weeks we'll be converting the following categories from eBay Item Specifics to Custom Item Specifics:

If you are currently using eBay Item Specifics for these categories, you do not need to convert your application immediately. eBay will continue to support eBay Item Specifics uploads in the AddItem family of calls even after the category has been converted to use Custom Item Specifics. Items uploaded with eBay Item Specifics will be automatically converted to the Custom Item Specifics platform.

If, however, your application is dependent on GetItem to update Item Specifics information, you will need to update your application to read Custom Item Specifics when these categories are converted.

We will test these categories until the end of April. Pending test results, we will convert further categories to Custom Item Specifics by early May. The next batch of categories will include Shoes for both Men and Women and Sheets.  

We expect to have fully converted all of the Clothing, Shoes and Accessories Categories as well as much of Home and Garden by mid-June. Throughout all of these conversions the old Item Specifics will continue to be supported in AddItem. This dual support will last through the rest of 2009.