To kick-off this year’s eBay DevCon, eBay announced that it has opened up Selling Manager (an online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay) to third party application development. The goal in providing developers access to eBay’s community of professional sellers is to create more opportunities to proliferate selling tools and to give sellers a wider variety of sales optimization applications.
It’s a small but significant step in that it’s the first time eBay has invited developers to submit seller tools for inclusion directly onto eBay Selling Manager and with more than 700,000 professional eBay sellers currently using Selling Manager, it’ll be great to see the feedback.
From the Press Release:
“Third party developers want our help with marketing and distribution, and sellers consistently seek better tools to help them scale,” said Max Mancini, senior director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation at eBay. “Opening eBay.com directly to third party applications through the Selling Manager, gives developers an immediate channel to growth-minded eBay sellers.”
External applications built using eBay Web Services already account for more than 28 percent of all eBay.com listings. Today’s announcement promises even tighter and more lucrative integration between eBay and third-party developers. Discovering and subscribing to a third-party application or feature within Selling Manager will be identical to how eBay-developed selling features and applications are offered on eBay.com today. Once selected, this application will be included in a user’s set of advanced selling features from My eBay. Interested subscribers will get a free, 30-day evaluation period to trial applications.
The keynote is set to include a demo but I plan on getting some 1:1 time later today so feel free to shoot me your questions related to that ahead of time.
About the eBay Developer’s Program
Started in 2000, eBay’s Developers Program has more than 70,000 members and offers developers the best outlet on the Web to monetize their applications. Developers interested in participating in the next generation of platform access can visit the following site for more information:
http://developer.ebay.com/echo.
Cheers,
RBH