Selling Manager Applications
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This release is a documentation release (only). This section describes the documentation changes.
The Users Guide contains changes and additions, including updates in the following areas:
The Managed Billing Platform Guide contains changes and additions, including updates in the following areas:
You can use the Developer Tools announcements to view the latest status for SM Apps tools. Also see the SM Apps forum.
The Open eBay Application Integration service now provides a method for retrieving billing statement information about a user's subscription account. This is intended to help with user support, to help you respond if a user contacts you with questions about a charge or a statement. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
The Open eBay Application Integration service also adds a method for you to adjust a user's billing statment balance, and to adjust line item charges on a billing statement. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
If you want to bill a subscriber before the end of the free trial period, say because you offer limited functionality during the trial period and the user decides to subscribe immediately to get full access to your application, you can now set the subscriber's start date to fall before the end of the free trial period. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
A new OpeneBayParticipantInterface call is sent by eBay when you need to update information about an eBay member in your subscription database.
If a user of your application has a past-due balance, the user's subscription is suspended. If, after suspension, the user makes a one-time payment, the subscription is re-activated within a few minutes. But if the user takes no action (for 3 days), the user's subscription is cancelled. You are notified of these events by an UpdateSubscriber call made to your application.
For information about past-due accounts, and how a user can quickly re-activate a subscription, see Past Due Accounts. For a link to the UpdateSubscriber documentation, see the OpeneBayParticipantInterface Release Notes.
As announced on August 17, all Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro subscribers can use Selling Manager Applications.
The AddUsage call, in the Open eBay Application Integration service, contains an immediate payment option. For more information, see the Release Notes for the service.
On the SM Apps Developer Tools Status page, you can view the status, for Selling Manager Applications, of the following:
This section describes features that will be available at the following times:
You can now submit usage records and other charges, such as setup fees, non-recurring fees, and even recurring fees, to be included in your subscribers' monthly billing statements. For a description of how this works, see Usage-Based Billing in the Users Guide.
Two new services are introduced to enable usage-based billing:
Until the end of September 2009, API testing of usage-based billing will be limited. You can use the WSDLs and service interfaces to start integrating the addUsage call, but complete integration testing will only be available for applications that are configured for usage in the production environment. Sandbox is not yet fully enabled to process usage transactions.
Developers with usage plans scheduled to be set up by late July can begin testing in production as early as 7/29/09. Developers with usage plans scheduled to be set up by late August can begin testing in production around 8/26/09.
If you do not yet know when your usage plans are scheduled to be set up, submit a support request via DTS to request you usage plan go-live date.
As announced in the Users Guide in May, production and sandbox disruptions, and changes to the Open eBay Participant Interface, will occur as follows:
This section describes features that will be available at the following times:
The Managed Billing platform enables billing for your application. Options available for billing include a recurring subscription charge, a one-time fee, or usage-based billing. Alternatively, an application can be free.
The release of the Managed Billing platform is from June 23 to July 7. For a Selling Manager Application in production, you receive 80 percent of revenue generated from fee-based subscriptions or purchases of your application. There is a 20 percent service fee charged on all fee-based plans, inclusive of your payment processing fees (PayPal, Credit Card, etc.). The service fee is debited, monthly, from your PayPal account. For users to subscribe to your application, you must have created a subscription plan, unless your plan is free.
Before creating a plan, you must:
For information about subscription plans, see the Managed Billing Platform Guide. The Managed Billing Platform Guide describes what's needed for subscription plans, how invoicing works, and other important information.
Currently, subscription plans are created through the following process: After approval of the Business Readiness Review, you use your Business Readiness Review support request to request a Billing Plan spreadsheet. After you receive and then fill out the Billing Plan spreadsheet, you submit it within the same Business Readiness Review support request.
For descriptions of the fields to fill out in the Billing Plan spreadsheet, see the following section of the Managed Billing Platform Guide: "Appendix – Billing Plan Definition Information."
In upcoming months, you will be able to create billing (subscription) plans through the Embedded Applications tab on the My Account page.
In the Open eBay Participant Interface (OEPI), in the addSubscriber and removeSubscriber calls, the
subscriptionInfo container has subscription plan information. Additionally, the signature
and token values are now in a credentials container. For more information,
see the OpeneBayParticipantInterface
Release Notes.
The flow for submitting your application for the Selling Application Directory is now live and accessible through the Embedded Applications tab on the My Account page. This application directory showcases your description of your Selling Manager application and your application's logo in a directory of available applications.
Known issue with the Application Directory Submission Flow
Your application may not appear for any user if you have marked it "private" in your deployment descriptor. If this happens, you will need to upload a modified deployment descriptor where "public=true".
To support subscriptions, specify a value of subscription for the implements tag in the deployment descriptor. The implements tag in the deployment descriptor lets you opt in or out of the subscription feature. If you specify subscription in the implements tag,
eBay sends addSubscriber and removeSubscriber calls to your application.
Leave the tag empty if your application does not support a subscription plan and has not implemented a subscription listener.
See the deployment descriptor sample here: sample-DD.xml
Updates to the way signatures and other parameters are passed in makeRequest and the render URL have enhanced the security of information passed by Selling Manager applications. A new signature, sig, replaces the old signature, sg. The parameters being signed are now contained in the sp parameter, which references the st, is, user preferences, and other parameters. The sp parameter, which is passed in the HTTP request, contains the parameters in a comma-separated list. This change adds a new step to the decryption and verification of signatures: it is now necessary to concatenate the parameters referenced in sp. We still provide sample code for decryption and verification, and will now additionally provide sample code for assembling the signature.
This section describes documentation changes for the release in late June, 2009.
The documentation additions include updates to:
For information about this Beta release of Selling Manager Applications, see the Selling Manager Applications product page. For information about how to develop a Selling Manager application, see the Users Guide.
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