Speaking at the ninth annual eBay Developers Conference 2010 in San Jose, Calif., eBay CEO John Donahoe and SVP and CTO Mark Carges highlighted new opportunities and successes for developers on the company’s platforms. They cited increased focus on developers as customers and new open initiatives for developers. In addition, they emphasized that developers are playing an increasingly big role in the eBay ecosystem.
Donahoe noted that more than 15 percent of eBay’s Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) now comes from third-party developer tools, and that there are now more than 110,000 developers in the eBay community. Over a half billion dollars in GMV per month on eBay comes from third-party listings. Donahoe said that developers can succeed alongside eBay,, projecting e-commerce growth from 5 percent of offline retail sales today to over 20 percent in the next five years. He singled out mobile, social, and local technologies as important drivers of that growth.
“I am absolutely committed to making eBay a more technology-driven company, and that’s the only way we’re going to be able to innovate and win,” he said, noting that PayPal opening its payments platform last year was the best example of the company’s commitment to enabling innovation. “It’s the first payment platform to completely open up in history.”
The eBay platform, too, is more focused than ever on openness. Open eBay, a platform that allows developers to integrate applications directly in the eBay.com interface where U.S. sellers can subscribe to them, is one of the company’s most successful developer-focused initiatives. Some of its successes were recognized at the conference, where the winners of the 2010 Star Developer Awards were announced. Among the winning solutions, with numerous other examples available at eBay’s App Center, were:
- Early Adopter: Quantity Manager , an automatic listing management tool for eBay sellers, and Price Spectre, a dynamic pricing agent that monitors competitors’ prices and adjusts a subscriber’s listing price accordingly, by NullApps;
- Most Innovative: Outright, an application that automates eBay sales and expense tracking for more efficient tax preparation, by Outright;
- Rapid Evolution: Vendio Reviser, a bulk revision solution for updating large numbers of live listings, by Vendio
Emphasizing that eBay’s focus on developers has helped both developers and the company in the past year, Mark Carges, eBay’s SVP and CTO, noted that there were only 18 developer applications at last year’s conference, up to 45 at this year’s event. He also cited new surveys, app suggestion pages, and other efforts to connect developers with eBay and with buyers and sellers. Finally, he noted that eBay has opened up a number of key APIs for developers, including a Finding API that makes powerful search capabilities available within applications, and a Product API, for detailing product compatibility when listings are posted.
“Later this year, there will be more opportunities for marketing your applications, including email marketing and targeted site advertising,” Carges said. “We want eBay to be the biggest opportunity for developers in e-commerce.”
eBay Developers Conference 2010 includes over 35 sessions focused on developers. Stay tuned for archived video versions of many of the sessions here.