eBay will unveil a new platform strategy called Project Echo tomorrow at their developer conference that is aimed at better servicing its seller community.
Ebay has had a rich set of developer APIs for some time now that let third party developers bring eBay functions and features into their applications. Now they are expanding those APIs and asking Developers to build apps to appear within the eBay Selling Manager, which 700,000 or so large eBay sellers use to manage their listings and customer information. Until now, all of the tools in Selling Manager have been created by Ebay.
A few partners will demo applications tomorrow - Hosted Support will show a CRM application to help sellers manage buyer communications and contact information, and Terapeak will show off an application that provides recent market research data to sellers, based on their listings (so if the price of iPhones suddenly drops when the 3G is announced, sellers who list those will get a notice).
The platform is far from actually launching - an alpha version will be available late this year, and will launch publicly in early 2009, they say.
This is analogous to Facebook Platform, Salesforce AppExchange and Google’s Open Social. When the platform launches there will be a defined markup language for developers to use (Ebay’s Max Mancini says they will look to Facebook and Open Social for guidance, and won’t reinvent the wheel), and other tools.
Looks like a useful tool for ebay sellers.
Good step up…
About time e-bay gives analytics type services to it’s sellers
This is probably just desperation. I would hardly imagine eBay couldn’t figure out how to do either of those themselves.
When will Amazon be doing this for sellers? …Anyone? …Bueller?
selling manager is a paid subscription service though so will there be revenue sharing with app developers?
I’ve been frustrated with eBay for a couple of years now. From their price hikes to their deceptive subscription fee practices and terrible customer service. They are dead to me. Amazon’s got some great tools, though.
As a 3rd party application that allows eBay sellers to embed video into their listings this step for us is very interesting. My eBay has previously been a walled garden so this is potentially an exciting move and it is about time that eBay worked hand-in-hand with software providers that ease the pain and frustration of selling on eBay rather than against them.
I always hated this about eBay: Do you realize that in this one article, the company’s name is listed as ebay, eBay Ebay, and ebaY (logo).
WTF. Not TechCrunch’s fault. ebAy totally screwed up their corporate branding.
Michael,
one quick correction. We are not requiring a new markup language. Existing web apps can be adapted in a matter of days to work with Project Echo. The only special markup that will be required is for widgets that live on our Selling Manager Summary page, and we are considering, with feedback from sellers, whether or not to leverage some of the existing “standards”.
-max
I used to love Ebay but I’m over it. It feels like shopping on 14th Street, now.
Well that is very cool as an advent ebay user I am very excited about using this technology.
what about ebay tools such as channeladvisor .
…so will eBay *not* support these applications with the same gusto that they don’t currently support File Exchange? Let’s not even talk about the horrific Turbo Lister…
eBay is finally squeezing the last drop from the value chain - automation tools. They never had much success with Selling Manager against entrenched favorites like Andale/Vendio, but opening the tool up as a platform will certainly make folks think again.
If I was Vendio CEO, I’d open up my platform to the same developer community. Fight fire with fire!
It’s interesting that eBay was pretty ambigous about whether they were going to latch onto an existing platform (e.g. Open Social) or do their own. eBay being eBay, it wouldn’t surprise me they will choose the latter, which I think would be a big mistake. And coming out “sometime in 2009″? Gosh, the world will change 3 times between now and then and by that time everyone will have moved on to something else.
It seems pretty obvious to me