EBay to open up merchant tool to developers

by Juan Carlos Peréz

June 17, 2008 —

EBay will open a tool used by 700,000 of its merchants to external developers,
the next step in an ongoing effort to promote the creation of applications for
its online marketplace.

For the first time, eBay will feature third-party applications within Selling
Manager, a tool merchants use to manage their eBay listings, the company plans
to announce Monday at its annual eBay Developers Conference in Chicago.

"We're taking our open [application development] platform to the next
level," said Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of mobile platform and
disruptive innovation.

Selling Manager is the most popular tool among eBay merchants, but so far has
only featured applications created by the company. However, eBay now recognizes
that it can't extend the tool's functionality on its own in a way that meets
all of its users' demands and requirements, Mancini said.

By turning Selling Manager into an open platform, eBay believes it will be
able to enhance the visibility of third-party applications for the benefit of
both the developers who create them and the merchants who adopt them.

The initiative, called Project Echo, is now in a closed, early-stage testing
phase, and will open up to public testing at the start of the fourth quarter.
A more advanced public beta test is slated for the first quarter and the official
launch is planned for mid-2009.

Merchants will be able to browse and search an applications directory for tools
and applications that could help them run their eBay business. In addition,
eBay will also deliver to them contextually relevant promotions for such tools
and applications, based on what the company knows about the merchants.

Mancini offered the hypothetical example of a merchant that sells its 10,000th
item, a milestone that could trigger a promotional suggestion for CRM (customer
relationship management) applications. "The point is to help sellers scale
their business," he said.

EBay hasn't yet decided whether developers will have to pay for their applications
promoted via the new contextually-relevant suggestion system, as in an advertising
program. It's still early in the rollout of the system and eBay will settle
on specifics later based on feedback from developers, Mancini said.

EBay is trying to help external developers market more effectively their applications,
by giving them more direct and targeted access to the type of professional seller
that typically uses Selling Manager, Mancini said.

"One of the biggest requests from developers is how we can help them to
promote and distribute their applications to sellers," Mancini said.

Developers who participate in Project Echo will also get access to previously
unavailable merchant data via new APIs, so that they can enrich their applications
with additional functionality, Mancini said.

Meanwhile, PayPal, eBay's online payment division, will also court external
developers next week when it announces a new Developer Central portal, designed
to support the creation of applications for PayPal.

"The goal is to help developers be more productive," said Glenn Lim,
PayPal's General Manager of Alliances and Developer Services.

The PayPal Developer Central portal will debut in July and will contain free
business and technical kits, including marketing materials, sample code, training
information and discussion forums.

The portal will also feature a directory where merchants can find developers
who have been certified by PayPal for building tools and applications for the
online payment system.

A preview
version of the portal is already up.

In addition to the portal, PayPal will also announce several new APIs and fraud
filters, including a Recurring Payments API for building subscription billing
into an applications and a Reference Transaction API to ease transactions with
repeat customers.

PayPal's Developer Program, established in 2001, currently has some 35,000
active developers, 300 of which have the PayPal certification. The eBay program,
founded in 2000, has about 70,000 developers.

IDG News Service