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Large Merchant Services

Posted by Curtis Gavin in Developers Conference
Wednesday, Jun.17.2009, 3:21 PM PT

I just got out of the session for eBay's Large Merchant Services product. This was presented by both Mohan Kumaresh, Large Merchant Services Product Manager at eBay, and Joel Mosby, Director of Product Engineering at Mercent Inc.

Mohan started the session by describing Large Merchant Services and its key features and benefits, including management by SKU, scalability for managing a large volume of listings, and passing computing burden (e.g., call retries) off to eBay.

I've seen most of the features and benefits of LMS described on the product page and in the documentation. As compelling as it is, I'd seen it before. Next, Mohan showed us what's on the roadmap, which is quite interesting.

Here's a quick look at what lies ahead:

• Auction format support—currently, LMS supports fixed price listings only
• Best Match transparency—download information about factors (e.g., price, shipping cost, DSRs, recent sales) sellers can control to improve search ranking of their listings
• Bulk picture upload
• Enhancements to reporting, such as PayPal fees, so sellers can calculate ROI at item or order level

With asynchronous processing and file uploads, LMS is a different kind of product. The development process, however, is straightforward and similar to other eBay APIs.

Joel Mosby, Director of Product Engineering at Mercent Inc., talked about Mercent's specific experience in implementing LMS. Mercent was an early adopter of LMS. Already, they have large merchants handling thousands of SKUs of inventory on eBay. For example, SmartBargains.com is using LMS to manage over 17,000 SKUs. They pass 154 feeds (data files) daily. Another user, AltrecOutdoors is managing nearly 9,000 SKUs and passing 95 feeds daily. Perhaps the most telling bit of data Joel shared was that Mercent was able to get Smartbargains on the LMS platform in the middle of the holiday period!

Typical usage patterns Mercent see with their users:

• Hourly listing updates
• Hourly inventory and pricing changes
• Sold Report twice hourly
• Order Adjustments and Fulfillments (shipment tracking info) twice hourly
• Active inventory reports daily

Joel went on to describe some more benefit from Mercent's perspective, such as how simple the transition was for large volume retailers selling in other channels to move inventory onto eBay with LMS. He also noted that eBay is a good marketplace for heavily discounted items. A benefit Joel came back to later in the session and which drew interest in the question and answer period was the ability to manage inventory by SKU. These benefits are a big differentiator for Mercent in attracting new customers.

Joel shared some best practices, as well as some lessons learned. All in all, this was a good practical session on one of eBay's most compelling products. I expected a pitch from Mohan and the truth from Joel. Well, that's what I got. Happily, they were pretty much in alignment.

-Curtis