| |
|
Posted by John Darrow in Documentation
Thursday, Nov.12.2009, 8:02 PM PT
Please remember to use a test environment when updating applications to use a new schema version.
To find out when a version of the API will be available, see the table at the top of the Release Notes for that API.
You can find the latest API documentation at the eBay Developer Documentation Center.
Trading
Trading Release Notes
Release Highlights
See the Trading API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
ShoppingShopping Release Notes
See the Shopping API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
Client AlertsClient Alerts Release Notes
See the Client Alerts API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
Merchant DataMerchant Data Release Notes
See the Large Merchant Services API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
John Darrow
API Tech Docs and Tools
|
|
Posted by John Darrow in Documentation & Product News
Thursday, Nov.05.2009, 3:23 PM PT
In October, eBay introduced changes in the Unpaid Item (UPI) Dispute process. We have a few clarifications and additions for you on this process. As noted in the UPI documentation, the new process lets you open a dispute as soon as 4 days after the transaction (instead of 7) and close disputes as soon as 4 days after opening the dispute (instead of 7), etc.
How do you know whether these new timelines apply to your disputes or not? It is all about the request version. If you created a UPI dispute with a request version lower than 637, the old timelines apply and the various platform notifications for messaging are still supported. But if the request version is 637 or greater, the new timelines apply, and the following platform notifications no longer apply: BuyerResponseDispute, SellerClosedDispute, SellerOpenedDispute, SellerRespondedToDispute. (The reason the notifications are not needed is because messages between buyer and seller are no longer added to the dispute.)
Support for the old process will be removed around March 2010, so please migrate your UPI dispute code to work with the new process.
What do you think of the new UPI process? I would like to hear your thoughts.
Fraser Smith
Senior Product Manager
developer-relations@ebay.com
|
|
Posted by Bradburn Young
Wednesday, Nov.04.2009, 9:17 PM PT
Right as you went in there was a high platform with a white-clad quartet playing stringed instruments exuberantly. A high school principal took a PayPal credit of $60k for his school, donated by conference attenders. There was a lot of tweeting. People tweeted all kinds of things: that we have seen the future of payments, that the netbook giveaway was Oprah-like in a nice way, that everyone involved deserved a round of beers, that you could use PayPal to turn all kinds of otherwise wasted things into commodities and trade them for other commodities, or money. Approximately ten percent of the tweets on day two were retweets of Tim O'Reilly giving the location of his presentation deck (here). A lot of people said the netbooks were nice. Some people said that social media is good for a business, and others disagreed, saying it's often boring. A lot of people liked the bean bag chairs. One person said the human chain was creepy, and another person said it was great. Somebody refused to be associated with the stealing of bean bag chairs. Many, many people agreed with this: "Two best characteristics of an entrepreneur are resourcefulness and ability to sell a vision." Someone said that they were on the stairs of the press room. Someone else said that the bean bag chair had been acquired. Chained payments, microsavings, adaptive payments, charge backs, and identity provision were much discussed. Several people said it all seemed very well organized, and I think somebody else said it was too organized. Someone said they were going back to the hotel early because they were afflicted with swag arm, but another person didn't seem tired at all, and tweeted that the PayPal API lets you establish pre-approvals with date and frequency and amount limits, allowing payments via mobile.
All that and more, at #ppxi09. Atlanta was in the house, and so was Germany. Also in the house: eBay, Salesforce, Sun, and Andreeson. Burkina Faso was seriously in the house, looking to bring eBay and PayPal to Africa. There was Red Bull and BLTs.Twinkies and Ding Dongs were never far away. If you held still, eventually someone would come up to you with a tray and offer you one. On the first night, there was poached halibut dusted with cumin, if you knew where to look for it. There was massive VC firepower on day two. Everyone felt that. x.com came back to life. If you can, you should always attend a PayPal developer's conference.
|
|
Posted by Bradburn Young in Developer Community
Monday, Nov.16.2009, 1:25 PM PT
The eBay Developers Program is here at PayPal X Innovate 09, where PayPal is opening new opportunities to the PayPal development community. Developers here heard about the latest eBay platform opportunity from Madhu Gupta, a lead product manager in the Selling Manager Applications project, and Neil Mansilla, a pilot developer who participated in the program from its infancy.
Madhu gave the context for the opportunity, and Neil talked about what it was like to develop seller applications embedded in sellers' eBay experience.
To give the context of Selling Manager Applications, Madhu sketched a quick history of eBay, highlighting the role of independent developers as eBay evolved into a global marketplace.
eBay is a sophisticated marketplace, where sellers are supported by a large library of helper applications that support business goals. While eBay created Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro to meet the more predictable and obvious seller business needs, independent developers used the eBay APIs to create a whole landscape of seller applications.
The challenge was, developers needed to get their applications in front of sellers, and let sellers know that their application would do what the marketing copy said it would do. And sellers needed to know how to navigate the landscape of seller applications: to find applications they needed, and to know they could trust the applications.
Selling Manager Applications puts a selection of trusted selling tools right in front of eBay sellers. Sellers can use these tools without leaving the eBay site. An application embedded in the applications tab in My eBay has advantages over other eBay selling applications:
- It's in an eBay app store
- Its subscription and usage billing are handled by eBay
- It's readily visible to sellers as an eBay-trusted application
- It can access the eBay APIs quickly, from within eBay
- Subscription is simplified, because a new subscriber doesn't have to
go through the usual flow that gives user tokens to applications.
Madhu demonstrated some basic development processes: how to upload an application to the eBay Sandbox by uploading the application's deployment descriptor, how to subscribe a user to the new application, and the user employing the application to change eBay listings. The demo took about seven minutes.
Neil described his experience with creating a Selling Manager application. He had written a useful little application that sends SMS messages. He had been distributing it for free, hosting it, and had about a thousand users. To turn it into a Selling Manager application, he edited a sample deployment descriptor that pointed to the application's endpoint, had eBay perform a business review and a product review, uploaded the application and entered it in the applications tab in My eBay. He now has a growing and worldwide list of subscribers who use his application and pay him monthly subscription fees.
Check out Madhu's presentation deck here.
You can learn more about Selling Manager Applications here.
|
|
Posted by Bradburn Young
Friday, Nov.06.2009, 11:25 AM PT
In one of the most interesting sessions here at PayPal X Innovate 09, two banking experts and a telecom business CIO from South Africa made presentations about financial services for the unbanked and underbanked populations of the U.S. and the developing world. They presented a vision of huge populations who manage their financial needs by paying billions of dollars in fees, penalties, interest, punitive interest, marked up transaction costs, cash-related losses, loss of time, and transportation costs. In the U.S., about forty million households are underbanked or unbanked. People in these categories use financial services for transactions, savings,
lending, and investing, but instead of banks and credit cards, they use
check-cashing places, payday loan stores, money orders, tax refund
anticipation loans, and services for sending money abroad. In the rest of the world, the unbanked are the majority of the population. The world is full of people who pay their electricity bills by bringing
cash with them on long bus rides and then wait in long
lines for their turn to pay, and merchants who lose money and time because they don't
have the financial instruments to plan their inventory, distribution,
and costs ahead of time. One helpful and profitable solution has been microfinance, which generally serves people with very small businesses. That population
of vendors (about 100 million people) is an important part of microfinance, but
there are other larger markets: about 600 million people whose wages, often for casual labor, are paid in
cash, and another 600 million small farmers. In Kenya, where 80% of the population have access to mobile phones but only 20% have bank accounts, Safaricom's M-PESA program enables people to transfer money P2P by mobile phone. Three years after its launch, 25% of adult Kenyans have adopted it. As the population of the developing world comes online, which it is doing very quickly, digital methods of payment, and online markets, will meet many of its needs. Whoever provides these markets and payment methods will profit by improving the lives of billions of people.
|
|
Posted by Bradburn Young in Developers Conference
Monday, Nov.16.2009, 1:27 PM PT
eBay is presenting some sessions here at the PayPal X Innovate 09 conference, and today, Rekha Patel of eBay gave her classic tutorial on how to get started creating applications using the eBay APIs. It's about the best introduction you can get to the eBay APIs. I humbly summarize. Suppose you are a casual eBay seller, selling five to ten items a week, and you want to ramp up to sell thousands of items per week. Listing via the eBay website won't be scalable for you. You'll need the eBay APIs. You can use the APIs to build widgets, gadgets, plugins, mobile applications, toolbars, and desktop and web applications. You can write these applications in any programming language that can sent HTTP requests. The applications can list items, manage inventory, find items, buy items, integrate with fulfillment systems, manage messages, manage user accounts, and perform and react to research about listings and transactions on eBay. The APIs fall into four main groups: Buying APIs
- Finding
- Shopping
- Merchandising
Research and Data APIs
- Price Research
- Advanced Research
Selling APIs
- Trading
- Large Merchant Services
- Feedback
- Best Match
- Selling Manager Applications
Monitoring APIs
- Platform Notifications
- Client Alerts
You can check them out and use them at developer.ebay.com. Rekha did two live demos. The first was a simple demo that showed how to find and use public information on eBay. This operation used the new Finding service to get information on the price and availability of an item listed on eBay, and then to filter the results by location and price. The second was more complicated, and showed how to use APIs on behalf of a user of your application, in ways that involve that user's private information and require that you have proof that you have that user's formal permission. Rekha showed the process of joining the eBay Developers Program, getting an application ID and keyset, creating a user in the eBay Sandbox, getting a token for the user using the eBay token tool, and linking that user to the application ID. You can do all of this in about ten minutes. Having demonstrated that it's not that hard to get started writing eBay applications, Rekha closed with some design considerations for eBay applications:
- Use the APIs that require the least amount of authorization. If you only want to do finding and research, you don't need to get user tokens to act on behalf of users.
- Test in the Sandbox.
- Implement retries in case of server errors.
- Use best practices as given in the API documentation and the Knowledge Base.
- Limit the data you process to what you need.
- Implement logging, especially if you have a selling application.
- Plan to renew user tokens before their expiration at 18 months.
- Plan to update your application to the current eBay version about every six months.
- Estimate your API call volume.
- If you need more than 5,000 API calls per day, apply for a Compatible Application Check, which raises your application's call limit.
You can learn all about the eBay API platform here:
Check out Rekha's presentation here.
|
|
Posted by John Darrow in Documentation
Monday, Nov.02.2009, 1:59 PM PT
Please remember to use a test environment when updating applications to use a new schema version.
To find out when a version of the API will be available, see the table at the top of the Release Notes for that API.
You can find the latest API documentation at the eBay Developer Documentation Center.
Trading
Trading Release Notes
Release Highlights
See the Trading API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
ShoppingShopping Release Notes
See the Shopping API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
Client AlertsClient Alerts Release Notes
See the Client Alerts API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
Merchant DataMerchant Data Release Notes
Release Highlights
See the Large Merchant Services API System Announcements for bug fixes included in this release.
John Darrow
API Tech Docs and Tools
|
|
Posted by John Darrow in Documentation
Tuesday, Oct.27.2009, 4:31 PM PT
Around the time version 637 of the Trading API was released, changes went into effect for the Unpaid Item Dispute process.
The Unpaid Item Disputes documentation now reflects these changes.
http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/XML/docs/WebHelp/Disputes-.html
Please compare the older/newer diagrams, and review the comparison table that lists older/newer processes and timelines.
John Darrow
API Tech Docs and Tools
|
|
Posted by Laurel Kline in Business News
Tuesday, Oct.20.2009, 12:38 PM PT
 Hi everyone,
I'm Kumar Kandaswamy, and I'm pleased to announce that we've named a new leader for the eBay Developers Program. Sri Shivananda, an experienced eBay veteran, was recently named Senior Director of Platform at eBay. In this role, Sri leads the eBay Developers Program as well as the Tech and Application Platforms. I will continue my involvement with the program and will be reporting into Sri, who will set the strategy for the teams.
We were lucky enough to get Sri when Half.com acquired Deja.com in Dec 2000. Since then he has worked in various engineering roles at the company including roles in operations, product development and architecture—the most recent of which was as head of Architecture.
During his time in architecture, he worked on helping create new solutions for various business & technology features while architecting for scalability, availability and reliability at Web scale. In this role, he was responsible for driving the technology strategy of the eBay marketplace. In addition, over the last 9 months, he has been a strong advocate at eBay to create features as re-usable services.
One fun fact about Sri, he's multi-lingual. He understands 5 languages, speaks & reads 4, and writes 2. So feel free to drop him a line to say "bonjour."
I know I speak for the entire program when I say that Sri is a great addition to the team, and we look forward to working with him to make this the best time yet for developers building applications with eBay's API platform.
With that, I'll introduce Sri.
-- Kumar Kandaswamy
|
|
Posted by Sri Shivananda in Business News
Tuesday, Oct.20.2009, 11:34 AM PT
 Hi all,
I'm Sri Shivananda, Senior Director of Platform at eBay, and the new head of the eBay Developers Program. I've been admiring this program from afar and I'm thrilled to be able to join Kumar and the rest of the folks here who have made this program a success. We're up to almost 100,000 members now! I look forward to meeting you all and working with you to ensure your success.
Since I'm new to this role, I'm going to hold off on announcing any new plans until I've had a chance to speak with developers and make sure I'm making the best decisions for the program and your opportunities with the eBay marketplace.
What I can share is that I am 100% behind the vision that Mark Carges provided in the eBay DevCon 2009 Keynote we hosted here at our headquarters in San Jose. That vision is to speed innovation and continue to support the platform to enable more flexible development for internal eBay developers and for API developers like you.
As an example of what we're working on, we recently launched Selling Manager Applications that provided third-party developers direct contact to sellers looking for useful tools to grow their businesses and make them successful.
I'd love to hear your questions and comments, and I invite you to drop me an email to introduce yourself at sri AT ebay DOT com or follow me on Twitter @srishivananda.
Thanks and I look forward to working with all of you!
Sincerely,
Sri Shivananda
|
|
|
