“Project Echo will revolutionize the magnitude to which developers can integrate with eBay.”
Open source has made a considerable effect on the “offline” world of packaged software, and perhaps having more important consequences on the web world.
In the latest sign of the significance of openness to development in a SaaS world, eBay announced that it will open up its Selling Manager tool used by 700,000 of its merchants to outside developers, the next step in a continuous effort to promote the creation of applications for its online marketplace.
For the first time, eBay will feature third-party applications within Selling Manager, a tool merchants use to manage their eBay listings, the company plans to announce at its annual eBay Developers Conference in Chicago.
“We are taking our open [application development] platform to the next level,” said Max Mancini, eBay’s senior director of mobile platform and disruptive innovation.
“Opening eBay.com directly to third-party applications through the Selling Manager gives developers an immediate channel to growth-minded eBay sellers,” an eBay spokesman said.
The new platform commencements are noteworthy in that they enable developers even more opportunities to make more money with eBay. eBay claims that their developer program currently has 70,000 members who have created approximately 12,000 live applications.
“We are announcing opening up the eBay.com site for developers and in the process enabling a new revenue generating channel for developers,” Kumar Kandaswamy, Senior Manager, Developer Platform Strategy, eBay Developers Program, said in a statement. “With Project Echo, the next generation eBay platform that is being announced, developers can embed their applications where hundreds of thousands of sellers manage their businesses on the eBay.com site.”
Selling Manager is an extremely popular tool among eBay merchants, but so far has only attributed applications created by the company. However, eBay now recognizes that it cannot extend the tool’s functionality on its own in a way that meets all of its users’ demands and requirements, Mancini said.
Kandaswamy observed that currently there are built in tools for eBay sellers today, but as sellers grow their businesses the need for additional capabilities have grown; the new developer initiative.
“One of the tools that eBay provides is the selling manager tool and we have over 700,000 sellers subscribing to the tool,” Kandaswamy explained. “What we are allowing developers to do is to embed their application through this framework where their applications will show up as an advanced selling feature so sellers could subscribe to the feature.”
eBay is attempting to help outside developers market their applications more effectively, by providing them more direct and targeted access to the type of professional seller that typically uses Selling Manager, Mancini said.
“One of the biggest requests from developers is how we can help them to promote and distribute their applications to sellers,” Mancini said.
Developers who participate in Project Echo will also get access to previously unavailable merchant data via new APIs, so that they can enrich their applications with additional functionality, Mancini said.
eBay’s new program is only in its emerging stages of development. But the company says its pro sellers that already use advanced selling features in Selling Manager will be able to find and subscribe to third-party tools the same way they do now for eBay-developed tools.
By turning Selling Manager into an open platform, eBay thinks it will be able to boost the visibility of third-party applications for the benefit of both the developers who create them and the merchants who adopt them.
The program, called Project Echo, is now in a closed, early-stage testing phase, and will open up to public testing at the start of the fourth quarter. A more sophisticated public beta test is slated for the first quarter and the official launch is planned for mid-2009.
Merchants will be able to browse and search an applications directory for tools and applications that could help them run their eBay business. In addition, eBay will also deliver to them contextually relevant promotions for such tools and applications, based on what the company knows about the merchants.
On a final note, eBay is also at last making publicly available the eBay Client Alert API that was first announced at the eBay developer conference in 2008.
“This API allows lightweight near real time alerts about activities on the eBay platform,” Kandaswamy explained.
“With Echo we are addressing distribution and discoverability,” Kandaswamy said. “We want to make sure sellers can find solutions and use them as they are scaling their business.”