Users of the Hong Kong eBay site can now access your US app.
To enable this feature, update and re-upload your app's deployment descriptor with the
new SubscriberRegistrationGlobalId. See Enabling International Users to Subscribe to Your US App in the User Guide.
For the new features available in the Open eBay Participant Interface, see the OEPI Release Notes.
For the new features available in the Open eBay Subscription Service, see the OESS Release Notes.
The Subscription Plan tool, on the Embedded Applications tab, must be used to set up a new plan (free or paid). However, to edit an existing plan (i.e., a plan that is in the submitted or active state), please continue to use the Billing Plan spreadsheet (see the Managed Billing Platform Guide).
For the new features available in the Open eBay Subscription Service (OESS), see the OESS Release Notes.
globalid Parameter in Render URLA new parameter identifying the user's current eBay site has been added to the render URL, for future use.
You can offer free promotional plans that are easy to subscribe to. You set the length of these free promotional plans.
Subscribers don't have to submit their payment information up front, as they do in the case of a free trial period. Additionally, subscribers don't have to remember to unsubscribe if they don't want to pay for continued use of your app.
When the period of a promotional plan ends, the plan is still "active" for the user, but instead of seeing a Start button (for running your application), the user sees an Upgrade button. This Upgrade button takes the user to a subscription flow, so the user can subscribe to one of your plans.
For more information about this feature, see Types of Free Plans.
It's now possible to edit your app's short description in the embedded applications tab in your My Account page. Just click the "directory entries" link in the Embedded Application Management page, and click Edit in the Action column.
The name of this program has changed. The "Selling Manager Applications" program has been renamed "Open eBay Apps." In entries in these Release Notes before March 9, 2010, the Open eBay Apps program is referred to as "SMApps" or "Selling Manager Applications."
The name of the directory where sellers can subscribe to your applications has also changed. With this release, the directory where approved Open eBay Apps are listed for sellers to subscribe is now called the "Apps Center." The Apps Center is at http://applications.ebay.com
By mid-March, 2010, Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro will no longer be prerequisite for sellers on the U.S. site to see and subscribe to Open eBay Apps. This represents a large increase in the pool of potential users of your app. Along with the potential increase in business, here are couple of things to keep in mind for the transition:
A new service, the Open eBay Subscription Service (OESS), is available. The service contains improved versions of some calls from the now-deprecated Open eBay Application Integration service (see below), and also contains some new calls.
The uses of this service include:
Also see the OESS Release Notes.
The Open eBay Subscription service is now available and will completely replace the Open eBay Application Integration service (OEAIS) by September 2010. Please migrate to the new service, which includes new calls that were unavailable in OEAIS. Additionally, in OEAIS, the addCredit and getCredits calls are unsupported.
You can enable users to upgrade and downgrade their plan, e.g. from a free plan to a paid plan. When this option is turned on for your application, users see the Change Plan option, in My eBay, for your application.
If you want to enable the Change Plan option for your users, you must do the following. For more information, see Implementing Subscription and Billing:
changeSubscriptionPlan call in your subscription listener in the sandbox.
getSubscribers call (in OESS) for confirming that your subscription database is correct.The requests of most of the calls in the OpeneBayParticipantInterface now contain more information, e.g. the billing start date. For a table with the new elements sent in the calls, see the OpeneBayParticipantInterface Release Notes. Also see the OpeneBayParticipantInterface Call Reference.
We hope the User Guide is easier to navigate now. We organized the information in the guide into three files and made a landing page that links to the new sections.
eBay has upgraded the Open eBay gadgets server to support OpenSocial version 0.9. This upgrade makes a number of new features available to gadgets developers. These and other new gadgets features are described below.
This upgrade makes available the new OpenSocial tag HttpRequest as an improvement over the older preloaded makeRequest call.
You can find OpenSocial documentation on HttpRequest here.
makeRequest is still available, but we recommend using HttpRequest. The advantages of using HttpRequest include:
HttpRequest integrates with OpenSocial templates, providing additional methods for creating content.Content rewriting lets you control whether references to external resources are rewritten to be cached and served up eBay servers when they appear in the source of an HTML-content gadget. This feature lets your HTML-type gadget decrease the load on your servers and use eBay servers to serve style sheets, JavaScript, and images. OpenSocial documentation on content rewriting is available here.
eBay supports the documented features, with the following rules:
link, script, ebmed, img and styleGET is now an option for rendering URL gadgets. Use ebay-params to specify that the gadget be rendered via the HTTP GET method. POST is still default.
Note that user information can't be encrypted in GET requests as it is in POST requests. Because of this limitation, GET should only be used in calls that do not pass confidential information. Such GET requests are signed, but do not contain the st parameter, which contains user information.
Syntax:
<Require feature="ebay-params"> <Param name="VIEW_NAME:url-render-type">RENDERING_METHOD</Param> </Require>
Example:
<Require feature="ebay-params"> <Param name="default:url-render-type">EBAY_GET</Param> <Param name="canvas:url-render-type">EBAY_POST</Param> </Require>
makeRequest no longer returns an error field. Standard HTTP status codes such as 200 are now included in response.rc.
If your URL-type gadget optionally requests features that are not supported by the eBay gadget server, the parameter unsup will report this state of affairs to you. This unsup parameter contains a list of unsupported features.
For URL- and HTML-type gadgets, requiring an unsupported feature will prevent the gadget from rendering.
Expanded and updated documentation about the Managed Billing Platform is now available:
When a user clicks the "unsubscribe" link to unsubscribe from your non-prorated plan, eBay sends an updateSubscriber call to your application with the the subscription end date in the note field. The subscriptionStateChangeInfo.newState field may still be Active, but the user's status in in your Active Subscribers list will be CancelledPending.
If you want to cancel the user's subscription immediately, use the control in the embedded applications tab in your My Account page as follows. In the embedded applications tab, select Active Users, and search for the user. Pull down the Status selection list, select Cancel Immediately, and then click Submit.
See the Open eBay Participant Interface Update Subscriber Call Reference for detailed information about the UpdateSubscriber call.
The addUsage call can now report a user's non-plan usage when the user's subscription is still in the free trial period.
See the Open eBay Application Integration AddUsage Call Reference for more information.
The User Management tool, accessible from the Embedded Applications tab, has been enhanced to provide more information about your subscribers.
Additionally, the User Management tool can be used to cancel a subscription immediately.
See Manually Viewing Subscription Data and Managing Subscribers.
This release is a documentation release (only). This section describes the documentation changes.
The Users Guide contains changes and additions, including updates in the following areas:
The Managed Billing Platform Guide contains changes and additions, including updates in the following areas:
You can use the Developer Tools announcements to view the latest status for SM Apps tools. Also see the SM Apps forum.
The Open eBay Application Integration service now provides a method for retrieving billing statement information about a user's subscription account. This is intended to help with user support, to help you respond if a user contacts you with questions about a charge or a statement. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
The Open eBay Application Integration service also adds a method for you to adjust a user's billing statment balance, and to adjust line item charges on a billing statement. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
If you want to bill a subscriber before the end of the free trial period, say because you offer limited functionality during the trial period and the user decides to subscribe immediately to get full access to your application, you can now set the subscriber's start date to fall before the end of the free trial period. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
A new OpeneBayParticipantInterface call is sent by eBay when you need to update information about an eBay member in your subscription database.
If a user of your application has a past-due balance, the user's subscription is suspended. If, after suspension, the user makes a one-time payment, the subscription is re-activated within a few minutes. But if the user takes no action (for 3 days), the user's subscription is cancelled. You are notified of these events by an UpdateSubscriber call made to your application.
For information about past-due accounts, and how a user can quickly re-activate a subscription, see Past Due Accounts. For a link to the UpdateSubscriber documentation, see the OpeneBayParticipantInterface Release Notes.
As announced on August 17, all Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro subscribers can use Selling Manager Applications.
The AddUsage call, in the Open eBay Application Integration service, contains an immediate payment option. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
On the SM Apps Developer Tools Status page, you can view the status, for Selling Manager Applications, of the following:
This section describes features that will be available at the following times:
You can now submit usage records and other charges, such as setup fees, non-recurring fees, and even recurring fees, to be included in your subscribers' monthly billing statements. For a description of how this works, see Usage-Based Billing in the Users Guide.
Two new services are introduced to enable usage-based billing:
Until the end of September 2009, API testing of usage-based billing will be limited. You can use the WSDLs and service interfaces to start integrating the addUsage call, but complete integration testing will only be available for applications that are configured for usage in the production environment. Sandbox is not yet fully enabled to process usage transactions.
Developers with usage plans scheduled to be set up by late July can begin testing in production as early as 7/29/09. Developers with usage plans scheduled to be set up by late August can begin testing in production around 8/26/09.
If you do not yet know when your usage plans are scheduled to be set up, submit a support request via DTS to request you usage plan go-live date.
As announced in the Users Guide in May, production and sandbox disruptions, and changes to the Open eBay Participant Interface, will occur as follows:
This section describes features that will be available at the following times:
The Managed Billing platform enables billing for your application. Options available for billing include a recurring subscription charge, a one-time fee, or usage-based billing. Alternatively, an application can be free.
The release of the Managed Billing platform is from June 23 to July 7. For a Selling Manager Application in production, you receive 80 percent of revenue generated from fee-based subscriptions or purchases of your application. There is a 20 percent service fee charged on all fee-based plans, inclusive of your payment processing fees (PayPal, Credit Card, etc.). The service fee is debited, monthly, from your PayPal account. For users to subscribe to your application, you must have created a subscription plan, unless your plan is free.
Before creating a plan, you must:
For information about subscription plans, see the Managed Billing Platform Guide. The Managed Billing Platform Guide describes what's needed for subscription plans, how invoicing works, and other important information.
Currently, subscription plans are created through the following process: After approval of the Business Readiness Review, you use your Business Readiness Review support request to request a Billing Plan spreadsheet. After you receive and then fill out the Billing Plan spreadsheet, you submit it within the same Business Readiness Review support request.
For descriptions of the fields to fill out in the Billing Plan spreadsheet, see the following section of the Managed Billing Platform Guide: "Appendix – Billing Plan Definition Information."
In upcoming months, you will be able to create billing (subscription) plans through the Embedded Applications tab on the My Account page.
In the Open eBay Participant Interface (OEPI), in the addSubscriber and removeSubscriber calls, the
subscriptionInfo container has subscription plan information. Additionally, the signature
and token values are now in a credentials container. For more information,
see the OpeneBayParticipantInterface
Release Notes.
The flow for submitting your application for the Apps Center is now live and accessible through the Embedded Applications tab on the My Account page. Apps Center showcases your description of your Selling Manager application and your application's logo in a directory of available applications.
Known issue with the Apps Center Submission Flow
Your application may not appear for any user if you have marked it "private" in your deployment descriptor. If this happens, you will need to upload a modified deployment descriptor where "public=true".
To support subscriptions, specify a value of subscription for the implements tag in the deployment descriptor. The implements tag in the deployment descriptor lets you opt in or out of the subscription feature. If you specify subscription in the implements tag,
eBay sends addSubscriber and removeSubscriber calls to your application.
Leave the tag empty if your application does not support a subscription plan and has not implemented a subscription listener.
See the deployment descriptor sample here: sample-DD.xml
Updates to the way signatures and other parameters are passed in makeRequest and the render URL have enhanced the security of information passed by Selling Manager applications. A new signature, sig, replaces the old signature, sg. The parameters being signed are now contained in the sp parameter, which references the st, is, user preferences, and other parameters. The sp parameter, which is passed in the HTTP request, contains the parameters in a comma-separated list. This change adds a new step to the decryption and verification of signatures: it is now necessary to concatenate the parameters referenced in sp. We still provide sample code for decryption and verification, and will now additionally provide sample code for assembling the signature.
This section describes documentation changes for the release in late June, 2009.
The documentation additions include updates to:
For information about this Beta release of Selling Manager Applications, see the Selling Manager Applications product page. For information about how to develop a Selling Manager application, see the Users Guide.
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