Our exclusive coverage of the eBay Developers Conference continues. Managing Editor Devin Comiskey is in San Jose covering the events this week.
Although eBay's Developers Conference is targeted to the folks working hard on various applications to make buyer and seller interaction easier on the giant auction site, there is plenty of news here for the small business owners and sole proprietors who rely on eBay as a source of income. Evangelists from both eBay and PayPal emphasized repeatedly how important it was for developers to focus on meeting the needs of the millions of entrepreneurs around the globe.
During Tuesday's keynote speech, PayPal President Jeff Jordan told developers that sole proprietors (businesses making $250,000 and under per year) and the SMB market ($250,000-$5M) are their biggest potential customers.
"You have a central role in expanding the marketplace of eBay and PayPal in ways we haven't even thought of," he said. "There is a $300 billion market outside of eBay."
PayPal took a big step in reaching out to small businesses last week when it debuted its new payment processing service Website Payments Pro. The new service gives online merchants the ability to now process credit card transactions on their own sites as opposed to re-directing customers to PayPal's site. The new Express Checkout feature enables buyers to make an online purchase without entering personal information on a Web site.
The small business theme was supported during another session on eBay Stores. Julian Green, Senior Manager Business Development of eBay Stores, gave developers insight into the types of services business owners who either run their business through eBay or use eBay Stores as a supplemental stream of income.
He said, "Sellers want help with designing a logo or brand, building pages that reflect their brand. They're interested in buyer incentive tools and customized freebies like pens and magnets."
Reaching Out
Developers were also given primers on various opportunities to start their own businesses helping e-commerce entrepreneurs with services based on extensive data mining on historic eBay auction data. Service providers such as Terapeak, Deep Analysis and Andale are some of the early players in this market
In Harnessing eBay's Transactional Data, Laura Della Torre, Certified Provider Manager, walked the audience through various programs eBay offers for those interested in taking advantage of eBay's data and turning it into not only a profitable business opportunity for developers, but also for providing entrepreneurs further insight into current marketplace trends to help them succeed and identify trends.
"There are more than 50 million items worldwide on eBay at any given moment. Five million added every day. This makes eBay one of the world's most reliable market data provider," said Della Torre.
Della Torre also alluded to eBay's own venture outside of its marketplace with its acquisition of shopping.com. Despite the whopping $10.6 billion in gross market value transactions in the first quarter of this year on eBay, the company is now making strides to capture even more outside the confines of eBay.com and is helping its partners do so also.
"This gives you new market opportunities for not only buyers and sellers on eBay, but in the outside world as well," she said.
Devin Comiskey is managing editor of ecommerce-guide.com.
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