Choice listings, anonymous email, but definitely not PayPal only on eBay.com

June 18, 2008

Adam Trachtenberg, eBay’s Director of Product Management for Platform & Services, gave an overview this morning of where eBay is going in the new few months. Though this was aimed primarily at developers, it provides some great news, and some not so great news, for sellers as to what we can expect for the rest of the year.

Project Echo : merchandising API

This will enable cross-merchandising, in the same way that many websites now highlight “people who bought x also bought y” items. Data based on geography, buying and search histories and user profile will be made available, as well as currently popular items.

Four new API calls have been released: most watched, deals, related category items and top selling products. More are on their way!

Improvements for large sellers

eBay aim to become more efficient and responsive to the needs of larger sellers, with a better API and business process support. Processing will be faster and there will be fewer timeouts with an asynchronous bulk interface: in effect, sellers will be able to manage their entire business away from My eBay, and will be able to organise inventory by their own SKU rather than by eBay item number.

Choice listings are coming

Sellers will be able to list variants of the same item: by colour, size, memory, material etc., compressing multiple listings into one single listing offering buyers a range of options. Interestingly, this was presented as enhancing the *buyer* experience by cutting down near-duplicate listings: I think eBay are missing a trick there, because many sellers have begged and pleaded for years to be allowed to offer real choice listings.

Changes to email communications

Sellers will be able to specify more than one email for message-forwarding: for example, customer service emails from buyers can go to one address, and eBay invoices to another.

Emails between sellers and buyers prior to a sale are being anonymised: buyer email addresses will no longer be visible on ASQs, though “reply” will still work as eBay will handle mapping between the anonymised email and the buyer’s actual email. Post-sale, both parties will be able to see each other’s email addresses. This should - say eBay - cut down on fraud: it will of course also limit off-site sales, and many sellers will complain that it will restrict communication between trading partners. They should also note that it will no longer be permitted to display an email address within the body of a listing.

Mandating essential information

eBay are forcing sellers to include information material to the transaction, some of which has previously been optional for inclusion within a listing. For example, on .com sellers must specify at least one domestic shipping service with pricing, as well as handling time, which will be used to display an estimated arrival time to buyers. A returns policy and who pays for the return of the item will also have to be specified, though on .com at least “no returns accepted” remains an acceptable policy (the same does not apply in most of Europe).

A consistant and safe checkout experience

Various approaches are being tested over different national sites: eBay Australia will (perhaps) be PayPal-only from mid-July, and UK sellers must offer PayPal though may offer other payment methods too. The US will “definitively” not be made PayPal-only, though eBay are “looking at data and talking to people” about the way forward on this issue.

New applications for third-party checkouts have now been closed: as a buyer, I can’t help but cheer here. I’ve been buying on eBay for nearly a decade and I still hate 3P checkouts, so how must new buyers feel?

A whitelist approach to HTML

Currently, eBay have adopted a blacklist approach to HTML, CSS and javascript, blocking known-bad code from use on the site. This will change to a whitelist approach, whereby known-good code will be permitted and everything else blocked. For the majority of sellers, this won’t make any difference whatsoever (Adam joked that there will be no block against ugly templates :lol: ) but anyone using javascript and Flash widgets within their templates may be impacted.

In an attempt to limit possible damage from bad code, descriptions will now be served from a seperate domain so that scraping of sign-in information within the eBay site should no longer be possible.

Verification of new sellers

New sellers will have to complete telephone verification and one of either PayPal or Live Chat verification once they have sold their first few listings, or when attempting to list a high dollar amount. This should keep the site a little more secure.

Adam wrapped up with what is definitely the theme of this DevCon: “we want your feedback”. eBay are certainly doing their best to appear to be listening to developers: they need to make buyers and sellers too feel that they’re being listened too. With big hints that “more change is coming”, the rest of this week is shaping up to be very interesting indeed.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Events, Featured | 18 Comments 

Project Echo: 3rd Party tool integration into SMP

June 17, 2008

Kumar Kandaswamy, the Senior Director of the Developer Program and Innovation at eBay, gave TameBay the inside track on Project Echo, the new API tools available to allow developers to integrate their applications with Selling Manager Pro (SMP).

He told how back in 2000 his team opened up the eBay platform using the Application Programing Interface (API) to allow third parties to develop eBay tools. With millions of users although eBay provide some great tools, they’re not enough to meet the needs of all users world wide. Over the course of the last seven years over 70,000 developers have used the interface with some 12,000 live applications using the API today.

Over 28% of listings come through 3rd party applications or 1/2 billion listings. If you include TurboLister and SMP the figure rises to over 60% of listings launched by tools using the API.

Kumar explained how Project Echo will enable the 3rd parties to bring their expertise and bolt their applications directly onto the eBay platform. Instead of having to visit a third party site or use a desktop application the tools will be accessible directly through SMP on eBay.

We can expect to see the first five applications available in SMP on eBay.com in Q4 this year, with public Beta starting in Q1 2009. Full product release is scheduled for the middle of 2009, with worldwide rollout to follow.

The first five applications built into eBay will be Terapeak (eBay research) and Hosted Support (customer support automation), who have already built their applications with Sagefire, MyStoreCredit and ShipRush to follow.

On the left of SMP there are already links to eBay features, so applications such as Terapeak will be added into the menu as a consistant seamless user experience.

Kumar explained that eBay will not compromise on security, scaleability and seamless useability. They will ensure applications offer the same security as eBay itself and that the providers are able to scale up for the thousands of users Project Echo opens their application up to. Once implemented users will be able to seamlessly click from SMP into the application without leaving the eBay site.

3rd party providers will also make subscription costs clear and Kumar is insisting that they offer a 30 day free trial so that users are able to try before they buy.

This is a golden opportunity of developers to put their applications in front of thousands of new buyers and sellers. For eBay users in the future your favourite application will be available seamlessly on eBay without the need to visit the developers sites or download applications.

Kumar is very excited at the API applications being given access to the eBay core platform, and rightly so. I can’t wait until every third party tool I use is available through the one website interface and is available from any and every PC that I log into.

What’s your favourite application and what features would you like to see developers build into eBay?

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Featured, Site Changes, eBay.com | Comments Off 

eBay to unveil new platform at DevCon

June 16, 2008

TechCrunch reveal that eBay’s Developer Conference will today unveil Project Echo, an expanded set of APIs allowing developers to build applications which can appear within the Seller Manager section of the site. Until now, only eBay’s own tools have been available within SM. The platform will not launch publicly until next year, but a couple of partners will demo applications built on it: Terapeak can show recent market research data to sellers, and Hosted Support offer a communications management tool.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under News | 2 Comments