eBay Selling Manager Applications - participation requirements
information regarding participation in eBay Selling Manager Applications
Table of contents:
Participation Guiding Principles
Our goal is to make it easy for eBay sellers to discover selling tools where they do their business everyday and for 3rd party developers to provide these tools within Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro, eBay's most popular tools for managing selling activities on eBay. Embed your application directly within Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro for US sellers on eBay.
eBay's professional sellers benefit from a streamlined and trusted site experience with access to advanced selling tools that meet their specific needs. Developers benefit by integrating, promoting and monetizing their third-party applications on the world's largest e-commerce site.
To achieve this end we have created a participation process which drives:
- Trust: The developer is truthful and respectful of our mutual customers. The application and the network are secure. The use of data honors privacy and is completely transparent to the customer.
- Reliability: Our mutual customers can count on you and your application to deliver the services advertised consistently.
- Great Customer Experience: Our mutual customers rate you and your application as delivering a great customer experience.
Participation Requirements
Vetting Process
Before an application may be published to our seller community, the developer goes through a Business Readiness Review and a final Application Review. Initial development and testing may be completed in the eBay sandbox environment with no review or vetting.
The purpose of the vetting process (Business Readiness Review and Application Review) is to make sure that the developer has the infrastructure in place to provide our mutual eBay's customers with a stable, available, and secure service that delivers a great customer experience while helping sellers grow their business.
Business Readiness Review
The Business Readiness Review evaluates the developer’s hosting infrastructure, business processes, billing plans and data security policies. Download the Business Readiness Review Questionnaire and Billing Plan spread sheets and submit them via a Developer Technical Support request requesting the review. Once you submit the completed questionnaire and billing plan, eBay will respond within 3 business days to the developer with a status or a request for clarification.
Unless there are significant changes to your hosting infrastructure, business process, or data security policies, a developer will only need to complete this review once.
Please note: you will need to have or to purchase 1 hour ($75) of technical support for this review.
Some of the types of questions you will be asked are:
- Do you have (or plan to have) regularly scheduled downtime or maintenance windows?
- What is (or will be) the process for reporting problems?
- What is or what will be your application code maintenance and update process?
- Please describe the process you would use to restore your systems in the case of a complete failure
- What metrics do you (and/or hosting provider) use to gauge capacity, throughput and growth?
- Describe how data supplied to the application is protected in transit, at both the data (e.g. hashing the value for a GET parameter) and channel levels (i.e. SSL)
Application Review
The Application Review evaluates the application for release to the eBay seller community. This evaluation checks to ensure that the application adheres to the Checklist for Going Live and the Third Party Developer UI Standards for Selling Manager Applications, Business Rules and—most important— that your marketing information, application directory entry, billing information, and documentation accurately describe the application.
Once an Application Review request is submitted, eBay will review the application and respond to the developer within 5 business days with a status or request for clarification.
Approved applications will be published and discoverable in the applications directory. This directory will be search engine optimized and advertised on eBay.com for sellers to find your application.
In addition to the initial application review, eBay will monitor applications on a periodic basis and inform the develop if issues are found.
Business Rules
eBay strives to provide a great experience for our sellers. We know that you do as well. Here are some guidelines that will help you, eBay, and all subscribers to Selling Manager Applications (SM Apps).
- Your application should help sellers with any aspect of the selling process. This can be post sales management, sourcing, listing, research, analytics, etc. Get creative, but remember applications that are not selling or sales related cannot be part of Selling Manager Applications.
- Selling Manager Applications must offer significant functionality. This means that applications used to demonstrate or market other applications will not be allowed. We have no limits on the scope of the application. It can be small, or large, but it needs to be perceived to be useful. If you have an external application whose full functionality is not supported by the SM Apps infrastructure, we will work with you to define a subset of functionality which will work within the framework.
- Subscribers can only be charged for subscriptions or usage of Selling Manager Applications through the Selling Manager Application billing. You may not ask your Selling Manager Applications subscribers for payment information.
- If you have an external application you can offer SM Apps subscribers to access this application outside of My eBay. However, this must be seen as an additional value-add. Subscribers should not need to log in to the external application in order to use important, core application functionality.
- Email can be useful, but also annoying. Give your subscribers the option to opt out of all email. Instructions on how to easily opt-out of email communication need to be within the footer of the email itself. Email should only contain links to the application inside Selling Manager Applications. You can not use email to market off eBay tools or services. Please try to keep the volume of Email you send to each subscriber low - you probably don’t like getting lots of email and neither will your subscribers.
- If your application addresses the shipping needs of eBay sellers, currently additional restrictions apply:
- Your application may not display side by side shipping calculations or comparisons of UPS with any other shipping services (except a comparison between UPS and US Postal Service may be permitted if you have permission from the relevant parties).
- Your application may not display the FedEx brand nor enable the printing of FedEx shipping labels.
- If you offer an application with related off-eBay functionality which is not available through your Selling Manager Application, you can describe how to access that functionality off-eBay in your FAQs or Help pages, subject to eBay’s approval.
Billing and Revenue Sharing
eBay has taken the work out of billing management by providing the infrastructure to do that for you. Developers who charge for their applications will define a billing plan which can either be a one-time fee, a recurring subscription, or usage-based. eBay will send billing statements to your subscribers or purchasers as well as manage the transaction of the payment for your application into your PayPal account.
You will need to create a billing plan for fee based applications (subscription and/or usage based) as well as for free applications (free billing plan) in order for sellers to subscribe to your application. The Managed Billing Platform Guide includes important information about billing options, plan requirements, and billing statements. Additionally, you will need to have a PayPal Verified account. Prior to or when submitting your application for review, you will want to have your billing plan information completed. Until the Billing Plan Upload tool is completed, you fill out the Billing Plan input form and input a support ticket to have it put into our system. The deadline for Billing Plans is the 10th of each month in order for your billing plan to go live by the middle of the following month. For example, if your billing plan is accepted by September 10th, it will be provisioned and be live to site by mid October.
All applications are required to have a minimum of 7 days free trial of their application or offer a free version of their application.
There will be a revenue share for developers charging eBay sellers for use of their applications. The developer will get 80% of the application fee appearing on the billing statement to the seller and eBay/PayPal will receive the remaining 20%.
Learn more
For more information, please review the following:
