eBay Announces Plan to Open Site to Third Party Developers
eBay has announced plans to allow third parties to integrate applications directly onto its ecommerce site. According to eBay, "this move will give developers unprecedented access to eBay’s community of professional sellers, creating more opportunities for developers to market their tools and giving sellers a wider variety of sales optimization applications."
Today’s decision to open the site marks the first time eBay has invited developers to submit seller tools for inclusion directly onto eBay Selling Manager, an online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay. More than 700,000 professional eBay sellers subscribe to Selling Manager, which until now has consisted entirely of applications developed in-house at eBay. By giving developers the opportunity to showcase their tools to eBay’s most active sellers, eBay aims to help developers and sellers alike create new revenue streams and maximize their ability to make money through eBay.
“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.
“This move presents a great opportunity for us to tap into the distribution and marketing scale of eBay in a way we’ve never been able to utilize before,” said Jerad Schempp, chief operating officer of Hosted Support. “We also get access to previously unavailable eBay data that will allow us to add functionality requested by our ezSupport customers. It represents a new frontier for us to drive customer adoption of our application.”
Developers interested in building applications on eBay.com will be required to meet site standards for trusted buying and selling experiences. Once approved, developers have an opportunity for their applications to be discovered by business sellers on eBay.com, and will be in a position to leverage this new channel to monetize their application with subscription-based revenue.
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