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| Thursday, October 08, 2009 |
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New Best Match API: What's your rank?
Today, we are pleased to announce that the Best Match Item Details API is available. You can use this new API to help sellers answer the following questions:
- Where is my listing appearing in search results when sorted by Best Match?
- How is my listing performing?
- What listing attributes help or hurt my listings rank?
- What can I do to improve my listing's rank?
- How do listings on page one of search results compare to my listing for a given search?
Best Match is the default sort order for search results on eBay. The goal of Best Match is to help buyers find what they're looking for, from sellers they trust.
Using the Best Match Item Details API, you can write applications that help sellers improve the Best Match rank of their listings. Additionally, you can enable sellers to view their items' click-through rates, their impression count range, and their items' sales per impression. An impression occurs on a listing when a user sees a search results page that contains the listing.
eBay also is releasing the Search Visibility tool, available in My eBay for sellers who can access the Seller Dashboard.
The Best Match Item Details API provides extra functionality that is not available in the Search Visibility tool. However, before you write an application, please note the information returned by the Search Visibility tool. For example, note the values returned for an item in the tool's Search Visibility Report. The values correspond to some of the values returned in a getBestMatchItemDetails response.
For more information about the Best Match Item Details API, see the Release Notes.
Last Chance for Special Developer Offer -- Act by Friday, 10/9!
We had a great webinar with developers last Thursday outlining the Selling Manager Applications developer opportunity we're offering before the holiday shopping season. If you had to miss it, not to worry! You can still email us at developer-relations AT ebay.com to get the details and get in on our offer before our deadline Next Week.
As a recap, if you submit your Business Readiness Review and your Billing Plan by Friday, October 9th, then successfully complete your Application Review to launch your SM Application by
Thursday, November 15th, you’ll get:
- four hours of premium DTS Support Requests and LiveHelp (a $300 value)
- premier marketing placement as a featured application for the month of December on the eBay Applications Directory (http://applications.ebay.com)
- we'll waive our eBay cut of the rev share (20%) through March 2010 –- so you get to keep 100% of your application fees earned through March 31, 2010
We want you to join us, so don’t delay! Email us and get in on our special deal by Friday, October 9th, so that you’re ready to access new customers and make more money in time for the busiest selling and shopping season on eBay.com.
- Delyn
Sellers can now revise live multi-quantity listings with sale
As announced, sellers can now edit almost everything in live multi-quantity fixed price listings even after a sale on the item, except for title, category, duration and format. If you need to add quantity, modify the item price, edit the description, modify shipping costs etc, you don’t need to end and recreate the listing. You can simply revise your live listings. Buyers who had previously bought the item will have an option to see the earlier version of the listing.
For developers looking for new revenue opportunities, consider building feature-rich revision tools. Sellers are searching for listing revision tools that help them identify which listings need to be revised, regardless of which tool launched the listing. For easy policy compliance updates, we recommend all listing tools offer listing revisions, including multi-quantity fixed price items with a sale, with a quick way for sellers to determine which listings need revision. Or build a new revenue stream by building a query and revise tool, for easy search and replace on any parameter (even return value = null).
Developers will want to update their code to retrieve a particular version of a listing for proper reconciliation and dispute resolution purposes.
Developer Impact:
No code change is necessary to edit these listings, but any developer blocking these types of edits should remove such a block. Revisions can be done using any existing revise API call including ReviseItem, ReviseFixedPriceItem, ReviseInventoryStatus. Be sure you are using ReviseFixedPriceItem or ReviseItem
so no additional seller fees are incurred (i.e. when using RelistFixedPriceItem). Revisions on multi-quantity fixed priced listings with a sale will still be blocked if a seller tries to edit title, category, duration or format.
When retrieving listings, a new Transaction ID field was added to GetItem on release 627 and GetItemTransactions on release 635 to return a specific version of the listing. If no transaction is specified, the latest version will be returned. Changes to the GetItemTransaction API call may cause a change to the behavior of several Platform Notifications. GetSellerTransactions
will return the snapshot of the item as it was at time of transaction on release 635. Read the Release notes for more information.
Resources:
eBay Giving Works lowers minimum donation to $1, extends automatic collection date
Starting October 1, the eBay Giving Works minimum donation will be reduced from $5 to $1 per successful listing. In addition, the automatic collection date for donations will be extended from the second Monday after a listing ends to the fourth Monday after a listing ends.
The lower minimum donation will make it more affordable than ever for sellers to get the cause marketing benefits of eBay Giving Works. The extra two weeks before automatic donation collection gives sellers more time to receive their funds from PayPal and the buyer, before MissionFish collects the donation. (As always, donation minimums and collections dates do not apply to nonprofits selling on eBay to raise funds.)
If you have questions about these changes — or want to learn how to offer eBay Giving Works to your users — please contact MissionFish, eBay’s nonprofit partner. For information on how to use the API with Giving Works, see the API Docs.
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