Monday, June 16th, 2008
3rd Party App Development now open on eBay’s Selling Manager
To kick-off this year’s eBay DevCon, eBay announced that it has opened up Selling Manager (an online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay) to third party application development. The goal in providing developers access to eBay’s community of professional sellers is to create more opportunities to proliferate selling tools and to give sellers a wider variety of sales optimization applications.
It’s a small but significant step in that it’s the first time eBay has invited developers to submit seller tools for inclusion directly onto eBay Selling Manager and with more than 700,000 professional eBay sellers currently using Selling Manager, it’ll be great to see the feedback.
From the Press Release:
“Third party developers want our help with marketing and distribution, and sellers consistently seek better tools to help them scale,” said Max Mancini, senior director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation at eBay. “Opening eBay.com directly to third party applications through the Selling Manager, gives developers an immediate channel to growth-minded eBay sellers.”External applications built using eBay Web Services already account for more than 28 percent of all eBay.com listings. Today’s announcement promises even tighter and more lucrative integration between eBay and third-party developers. Discovering and subscribing to a third-party application or feature within Selling Manager will be identical to how eBay-developed selling features and applications are offered on eBay.com today. Once selected, this application will be included in a user’s set of advanced selling features from My eBay. Interested subscribers will get a free, 30-day evaluation period to trial applications.
The keynote is set to include a demo but I plan on getting some 1:1 time later today so feel free to shoot me your questions related to that ahead of time.
About the eBay Developer’s Program
Started in 2000, eBay’s Developers Program has more than 70,000 members and offers developers the best outlet on the Web to monetize their applications. Developers interested in participating in the next generation of platform access can visit the following site for more information:
http://developer.ebay.com/echo.
Cheers,
RBH
Tagged: ebay, ebaydevcon, ebaydevcon08, echo, ecommerce, paypal, sellers
MechelleOn 06.16.2008 at 7:38 pm Said:
Hi Richard- hope you are having a great time!
am I interpreting this accurately?
Rather than eBay put up the fund to provide cutting edge tools and services to their customers which is included in the cost of the store subscription- they are allowing outside developers to experiment with my store management tool and anything useful I’ll have to pay additional fees??
Is this correct?
Chris @ TameBayOn 06.17.2008 at 5:50 pm Said:
Hey Michelle, I prefer to look at it a different way… I already use several 3rd party tools which I pay for and I’d much prefer to carry on paying for them but interface them though the eBay platform than I would carry on paying for them and either have to download software or to log onto another website to access them.
To me it’s not a choice of using or not using, paying or not paying… it’s simply more convenient to access them through eBay 
MechelleOn 06.17.2008 at 7:59 pm Said:
that’s great it will work out for you
I look at it this way
I pay a subscription fee of 50 dollars + 10 for my pictures every month for my store- I feel eBay has a responsibility to its customers to make sure they offer the best possible tools available.
This is clearly eBay tossing the job to someone else rather than provide the best service for what I already pay for. I have no doubt that they will cease developing better apps for selling manager and it will become the job of 3rd party providers which will cost me additional fees.
Andy GeldmanOn 06.19.2008 at 2:51 am Said:
Mechelle, I disagree.
There are already hundreds of third-party tools available for eBay sellers, and Project Echo gives them the opportunity to integrate much more tightly with eBay.
Generally, a third-party tool should more than pay for itself with efficiency gains and (sometimes) real savings - for example with cheap image hosting, free scheduled relisting, and optimizing relisting credits (ChannelMax).
The eBay developer community will always offer something that eBay don’t do themselves. An analogy would be Microsoft - it’s their job to provide the platform but we don’t expect them to create every single piece of software for Windows, that’s what the developer community do.
MechelleOn 06.19.2008 at 4:05 am Said:
Microsoft is not analogy, because I don’t pay Microsoft a monthly fee. I don’t care who makes it as you said there are hundreds of solution providers and I am aware of that. The clear intent is for ebay to dump this off in someone else’s lap so they no longer have to put the investment into the system, and as a result I am going to be stuck paying for services that should already be covered in my store subscription fee.
Again, I think it is great that it will work out for you and I’m sure many other people who already purchase services from outside providers.
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