eBay Selling Manager Service: Platform is Open for Business

Richard Brewer-Hay — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:43:00 +0000

As I get ready to head over to the second day of the Web 2.0 Expo, eBay has announced that it has turned its Selling Manager service (previously known as Project Echo) into a beta platform that is now open to embedded third party tools. For the first time ever, third party eBay developers will be able to write applications that are embedded directly onto ebay.com.

Here is a video overview of the Selling Manager service:

More than 87,000 third party developers have already built more than 13,000 live applications that consume eBay’s Web services and the Selling Manager tool has 270,000 active subscribers in the US. You can read more about the significance of this latest announcement over on the eBay Developer blog. The press release, screen shots and other materials around the news can be accessed here.

UPS
UPS is the first transportation provider on the eBay Selling Manager beta platform, and is integrating its premier shipping software – WorldShip™ – directly into the eBay experience so sellers can manage shipping for their business directly within My eBay at no cost:

Developers can join the beta and begin developing their eBay Selling Manager applications at http://developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications.

Like I said, I’m heading over to the Web 2.0 Expo this morning to visit the eBay booth (#608) and meeting folks from Terapeak, HostedSupport, ahTEXT.com and Cloud Conversion. I’ll also be attending eBay CTO and SVP of Platform Mark Carges’ keynote at 5:20pm. I’m told the keynote will focus on “5 Things that Matter for Developers Today.”

I’ll do my best to send updates via Twitter (http://twitter.com/ebayinkblog) throughout the day. I’ll also be taking photos and putting together a wrap-up blog post following Mark’s keynote later today.

Cheers,
RBH

The Week that Was

Richard Brewer-Hay — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:08:07 +0000

A lot can happen in 5 days. Tuesday was as big as they come (regardless of your political viewpoint) and the groundswell of emotion seen around the world as a result of it is pretty incredible.

I also came on the blog, firmly planted a stake in the ground regarding eBay Ink, and then seemingly vanished for the rest of the week. (Meetings will do that to me but all for good reason. Looking forward to sharing the results here on Ink in the coming weeks).

Some other highlights that are worth mentioning…

Motorola is possibly prohibiting the resale of its new phone online.
I still don’t know if this is actually happening and if anyone does know more, please share here or shoot me an email because I can’t imagine that EU Law doesn’t have a policy in place to prevent something like this… similar to the first-sale doctrine here in the United States. Mathew Ingram has a great take on exactly that here.

The eBay Developers Blog had a couple of key announcements this week.
First, they announced that PayPal had added support for eBay Coupons to Express Checkout. The blog used examples and artwork to show how this would look moving forward.

Secondly, they also announced ways in which folks could celebrate the 8th year anniversary of the eBay Developer Program and the eBay API platform. The program launched in November of 2000 and since then:
• Over 70,000 developers have registered as members of the eBay Developers Program
• Over 26% of all listings on eBay.com currently come from our third party eBay developer community
• eBay now serves up over 6 Billion API calls monthly

Finally, for those occasions like this week when I am in back-to-back planning meetings, please remember that we do have the “eBay You Say” and “eBay We Say” modules at the bottom of the eBay Ink homepage. The We Say module captures every blog post by eBay’s family of official blogs (see the blog roll to the right of the page) and updates in real-time, automatically. The You Say module captures the latest (and what I find to be the most interesting) external blog posts for readers.

Cheers,
RBH

eBay Ink » API

eBay Selling Manager Service: Platform is Open for Business

The Week that Was