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Developers Program: Business and Product Feedback Forum
Posted by
Bradburn Young
in Developers Conference
Thursday, Jun.18.2009, 6:38 PM PT
The feedback forum is a Developers Conference tradition. Adam opened by inviting people to mock his octopus-themed Hawaiian shirt, and then Adam, Madhu, Hema, Catherine and Kristina invited questions from the developer community.
The discussion wandered all over eBay. The following is a list of requests and questions and intentions that surfaced during the hour-long exchange.
- There should be more video demos. The one for Selling Manager applications was cool. "Making Your First API Call" would be good.
- Back when the Sandbox was less reliable we used to tell people not to bother with it. We think it's better now, and should be used. We don't deny that we said that back then, but we don't say it anymore.
- There should be code samples for Ruby on Rails. On the other hand, it's hard to maintain many code samples for many features and keep the samples accurate. And inaccurate code samples waste people's time.
- Smarter messaging that highlights really crucial news, such as upcoming changes that might break your code if you don't watch out, from chatty or less pressing news, would be good.
- There should be special communications about seller changes, now that they are bundled into two or three releases per year. There are special communications, but it is possible for a developer to miss them.
- The Sandbox should completely mirror the Production environment, almost.
- There should be debugging in Sandbox beyond just the error messages.
- Know that there is love for the Shopping API ("a nice bite-sized chunk, easy to get into"), and for the Token Generation Tool ("oh, my hand's being held here!").
- Developers would benefit if knowledgeable members of the Developers Program put together a list of the top ten little-known but very useful features of the eBay APIs.
- The Developers Program could issue requests for applications to the developer community, and could pass along user requests for applications.
- It should be easier to get associated PayPal data while executing an eBay transaction. It is no trivial thing to switch over to the PayPal APIs in the middle of eBay business.
- The Developers Program should know the developers' applications as well as the developers know the APIs, and be able to tell developers about upcoming features that will affect specific applications.
- There should be someone at eBay who can discuss big-picture questions and policy questions. This is complicated because if the program formally tells someone that a particular practice is acceptable, legal issues could arise.
- There sure are a lot of services now. Is it going to become easier or harder to know where to look for functionality? We are trying to make it easier. Some of the apparent overlap is actually between calls that are asynchronous and calls that are synchronous.
- How large do your merchants need to be to qualify for Large Merchant Services? Answer: large enough to feel the pinch on their throughput, or to see timeouts on huge listing calls. Ask us about it.
