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Posted by Bradburn Young in Developers Conference
Friday, Jun.19.2009, 5:04 PM PT
This morning about forty developers gathered at eBay for a Q and A session with some of the SMApps creators. Max Mancini, Farhang Kassaei, Tina Mazzei, Madhu Gupta, and Mike Maffeo answered probing questions for an hour. You can read the fourteen most discussed questions below.
Q: What are the billing options?
A: Selected from developer feedback, we're offering the most popular billing options: free, one-time fee, regular subscription fee, and usage-based fees.
Q: What is the vetting process for getting my app into Selling Manager Applications?
A: The vetting process involves two levels of review. The first level is a review of your security, hosting environment, development process, and customer handling. The second level of review, after you have created the application and are ready to go live, is to determine whether your application does what your description says it does, has a reasonable billing plan, doesn't violate security and other requirements, and looks good (conforms to SMApps UI Guidelines). The review is serious, because when you include your application in SMApps, eBay's customers become your customers.
Q: Do I need a big group of developers, or to be a big company, to participate?
A: No.
Q: What's the deal with basing SMApps technology on the Gadgets Specification?
A: Developers are using that technology, and applications created with it are re-usable across the web. We have created an implementation of it that has a few special features, but basically we are compatible with OpenSocial. (About 25% of the developers in the audience raised their hands when asked if they had developed using the Gadgets Specification.)
Q: There are two different kinds of gadgets? What are they, and why should I use one instead of the other?
A: You can expose your existing application as a Selling Manager app by just specifying its URL in your deployment descriptor and implementing a subscription listener. That's a URL-type gadget. Or you can write your gadget completely in the deployment descriptor, and it will be hosted on eBay. That's an HTML-type gadget.
Q: What types of application are good candidates for SMApps?
A: Based on our research, we think email management, customer management, shipping and fulfillment, bulk editing of listings, UPI process management, and inventory management are all pretty good bets. But that doesn't preclude other types. We know that we have not anticipated all the directions developers might go with this opportunity, and we expect to be pleasantly surprised by innovative implementations.
Q: What about multi-channel applications that might compete with eBay?
A: We are very mature and understanding about that. We know you have choices, and we try to be your best option.
Q: Why still require subscriptions to Selling Manager, since it's now free?
A: Historically, My eBay and Selling Manager serve different kinds of sellers. Some eBay sellers report that Selling Manager is more complex than their needs require. Long-term goal: it would be nice if Selling Manager and My eBay could merge. If ever we are able do that, we promise we will limit the interruption for everyone, including users of your Selling Manager application, to a minimum.
Q: What's going to happen with customer reviews and ranking of applications?
A: This is a big part of our plans for SMApps, because it assures sellers and makes them comfortable choosing to subscribe to a well-reviewed and popular application. We are already collecting data, but we are still defining the logic we will use in the ratings. Our intention: to drive sellers to the best possible experience, and to make sure that excellent applications are seen by potential subscribers.
Q: What should I know about authorization and authentication?
A: The subscription process is going to be pretty much what subscribers will expect a subscription process to be. It is simpler than the auth and auth flow for other eBay APIs. We were able to make it that way because we decided to rely on you, the application developer, to verify the subscription requests we send you. Subscription requests that eBay sends to your application are signed and encrypted. We have made instructions and code samples available to help with that necessary step.
Q: If a seller unsubscribes from my application, is his or her token revoked?
A: Yes.
Q: What if one of my existing subscribers wants to use my application as a Selling Manager application?
A: If the seller doesn't recognize the application, on subscription you will have a user ID, EAIS token, and email to check against your current subscribers.
Q: If I don't charge for my application, what happens to the 80/20 split?
A: We get 20% of nothing. We don't mind, if you don't.
Q: What about sellers with multiple eBay IDs?
A: The challenge of managing multiple inventories and businesses under different seller IDs is not solved yet. It is pretty common, though, so we are trying to solve it.
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