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eBay's Next Gen Platform Opportunity
Posted by
Bradburn Young
in Developer Community
Monday, Nov.16.2009, 1:25 PM PT
The eBay Developers Program is here at PayPal X Innovate 09, where PayPal is opening new opportunities to the PayPal development community. Developers here heard about the latest eBay platform opportunity from Madhu Gupta, a lead product manager in the Selling Manager Applications project, and Neil Mansilla, a pilot developer who participated in the program from its infancy.
Madhu gave the context for the opportunity, and Neil talked about what it was like to develop seller applications embedded in sellers' eBay experience.
To give the context of Selling Manager Applications, Madhu sketched a quick history of eBay, highlighting the role of independent developers as eBay evolved into a global marketplace.
eBay is a sophisticated marketplace, where sellers are supported by a large library of helper applications that support business goals. While eBay created Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro to meet the more predictable and obvious seller business needs, independent developers used the eBay APIs to create a whole landscape of seller applications.
The challenge was, developers needed to get their applications in front of sellers, and let sellers know that their application would do what the marketing copy said it would do. And sellers needed to know how to navigate the landscape of seller applications: to find applications they needed, and to know they could trust the applications.
Selling Manager Applications puts a selection of trusted selling tools right in front of eBay sellers. Sellers can use these tools without leaving the eBay site. An application embedded in the applications tab in My eBay has advantages over other eBay selling applications:
- It's in an eBay app store
- Its subscription and usage billing are handled by eBay
- It's readily visible to sellers as an eBay-trusted application
- It can access the eBay APIs quickly, from within eBay
- Subscription is simplified, because a new subscriber doesn't have to
go through the usual flow that gives user tokens to applications.
Madhu demonstrated some basic development processes: how to upload an application to the eBay Sandbox by uploading the application's deployment descriptor, how to subscribe a user to the new application, and the user employing the application to change eBay listings. The demo took about seven minutes.
Neil described his experience with creating a Selling Manager application. He had written a useful little application that sends SMS messages. He had been distributing it for free, hosting it, and had about a thousand users. To turn it into a Selling Manager application, he edited a sample deployment descriptor that pointed to the application's endpoint, had eBay perform a business review and a product review, uploaded the application and entered it in the applications tab in My eBay. He now has a growing and worldwide list of subscribers who use his application and pay him monthly subscription fees.
Check out Madhu's presentation deck here.
You can learn more about Selling Manager Applications here.
