eBay to Open Site to Developers

eBay's new Project Echo platform will enable developers to embed their applications on ebay's site, getting their tools in front of hundreds of thousands of eBay sellers.

At its annual developers conference in Chicago this week, online auction giant eBay plans to announce Project Echo, a new platform that will enable developers to embed applications where more than 700,000 eBay sellers can subscribe to them. Project Echo will also include APIs that provide developers with information on buyer demographics and habits, along with inventory management tools.

eBay’s primary focus with Project Echo is to quickly offer new tools to its army of sellers: rather than attempting to develop all tools in-house, eBay is seeking to capitalize on developer interest in the platform: in exchange for opening up its API and providing developers access to information that was previously only available to eBay itself, the company hopes to jump-start customized and advanced capabilities for its sellers…and get a cut of the action every time an eBay developer makes a sale. eBay says it will evaluate third party applications to ensure they meet eBay guidelines.

Although most of the enhancement enabled by Project Echo will only be visible to sellers, one new feature will almost certainly impact eBay users: a new Merchandizing API will enable applications to more easily pick additional products and add-ons for users, more easily enabling up-selling and cross-selling on the eBay site.

eBay is also finally rolling out the Client Alert API—announced last year—which will offer users real-time alerts from eBay about account or item activity.

eBay says it has over 70,000 members in its developer program, and more than 12,000 software applications have already been built by third-party developers.