eBay offers easier links to blogs, cell phones and more
eBay has unveiled several new tools for software designed to make it easier to add eBay features to social networking sites and blogs, as well as to mobile phones, televisions and other devices.
Announced today at the eBay Developers Conference in Boston, the new toolset is available for free to the 50,000 developers registered with eBay, says Adam Trachtenberg, senior manager of platform evangelism and constructive innovation at eBay.
“We want to make sure it’s easy for people to access eBay anywhere they are,” he says. “If people want to access eBay from a blog or a phone because that’s what fits best into their lifestyle, it’s in our interest to facilitate that.”
With the new tools, for example, a social networking site geared to rock music fans could add a feature allowing visitors to track electric guitars for sale on eBay. The visitors could do all the things they would do at eBay.com, including viewing products, checking sellers’ ratings and making bids.
Each of those actions requires a “call” to eBay, and as part of this announcement, eBay said it would allow many more such interactions for free. Previously, eBay charged for each call after 10,000 per month. The new policy is to allow up to 150,000 monthly, and Trachtenberg says eBay will raise that to 1.5 million or even more for applications generating higher volume.
eBay demonstrated at the developers conference an application it created using its tools and technology from Adobe Systems Inc. that puts eBay functionality on a user’s desktop. Called Project San Dimas, it would allow faster and richer interaction with auction data than possible on a web site. It also allows the user to peruse data—such as the last 20 items viewed on eBay—while offline, such as when on an airplane, Trachtenberg says.
Among the other announcements eBay made are the following:
• eBay Shopping Web Services—a faster application programming interface, or API, that makes searching on eBay up to 16 times faster and makes it easier to develop buying applications
• eBay Bidding API—designed to make it easier to enable bidding on eBay from outside of the eBay web site
• Mobile Checkout from eBay subsidiary PayPal, making it easier to integrate mobile web sites to the PayPal payment service
• Certification programs for PayPal and ProStores, the eBay unit that provides e-commerce sites for small and midsized retailers.
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