The big news this week for e-tailers is eBay Live 2007. The annual gathering of the online auction giant's faithful kicks off today in Boston. ECommerce-Guide will be there, providing highlights from the conference in tomorrow's eBay Watch column, including Meg Whitman's keynote speech naturally, with more in-depth coverage slated for Monday.
We expect to find some shipping, packing and wholesale resources, sit in on some Web design and marketing seminars and meet with the major players in the industry. And while that will be worthwhile and interesting, we expect to find smaller businesses that aren't usually in the spotlight but nonetheless have stellar products and services that are a real find.
Today, however, we offer a preview of some early eBay Live announcements, including a few from developers who met earlier this week, as well as a roundup of what's making headlines elsewhere in the industry this week.
Developers Reach Out to new Media
In eBay Developers Conference news, a series of new services were announced that would give the 50,000 third-party community the tools to bring eBay to phones, blogs, social networking sites and even TV, according to the auction giant.
The new services include the following:
eBay Shopping Web Services — a suite of APIs designed to make searching on eBay up to 16 times faster and allows developers to create buying applications.
eBay Bidding API — designed to let qualified developers can enable bidding on eBay from almost any platform.
eBay Client Alerts — near real-time alerts about platform activity.
New JavaScript and Flash Developer Centers — built to make it easier for JavaScript and Flash developers to access the eBay Web Services platform.
New Production Call Plan — access to API calls in the production environment raised from 10,000 per month to 150,000 per month, allowing new developers to rapidly scale up their applications.
Since its introduction in 2000, eBay Developers Program members have created 4,800 live applications that improve the experience of eBay's community of buyers and sellers, according to the company, and these developer applications now account for approximately one-quarter of eBay's listings. The APIs released this week are designed to make it easier to build solutions that give people ways to experience eBay without necessarily having to visit eBay.com.
Other eBay companies also made announcements this week about services that extend their platforms to more markets both on and off the Web. Here is a summary:
PayPal introduced a new suite of APIs, including Mobile Checkout, which is designed to allow developers to integrate any mobile Web site with the PayPal checkout process. The company also introduced a new Name-Value Pair API that allows developers to integrate PayPal more easily and quickly into Web sites and applications. In addition, PayPal launched the PayPal Certified Developer Program, allowing developers to become certified PayPal integrators.
Skype is calling on developers to join the Skype Developer Program, which offers the opportunity to earn cash through Skype Extras. Skype Extras are plug-ins written by independent third-party developers that let users expand Skype functionality.
Shopping.com announced plans for a revised API that will be available in Q3 2007, which will have a new interface, detailed documentation and tools for faster implementations. Like the current API, developers and partners will be able to improve the buyer experience by recreating a portion of Shopping.com's comparison shopping experience within their own sites.
ProStores launched a Design Certification Program so Web developers can design and build full-featured e-commerce stores on the ProStores platform.
Everest Peaks with eBay Integration
In other eBay news, Everest Software introduced eAuction Pro, an eBay integration feature for its recently launched Everest Advanced 4.0. The addition is designed to let sellers more efficiently manage their eBay stores by integrating both online and offline distribution channels.
The new integration automates the entire sales process; including listings publishing, order creation from completed auctions, payments, fulfillment, tracking and customer feedback management, among other functions. Now items can be automatically published on eBay, leveraging the existing product catalogs and inventory, according to the company.
Key features include the following:
Auction automation —; helps to create eBay listings directly from the Everest Inventory, offers presets for payment options and shipment methods. The feature includes a fee calculation estimator, as well as inventory allocation/reservation and listings revision/cancellation tools. In addition, it helps to define the business rules and suggests auctions to move items with slow turnover rates.
Order creation — designed to monitor auctions, automatically creates orders and assigns the inventory.
Central fulfillment — designed to offer single point of control over order processing.
Auction status and reporting — designed to monitor active listings and manages buyer profile reviews.
Upsell opportunities creation — designed to process customers through the Everest e-commerce Web site and offers complimentary products for additional purchases.
Auction analysis and customer lifetime value tracking — helps to boost ROI by identifying most profitable auctions and repeat buyers.
Bulk Processing — automates order creation, generates payment and shipment status updates, monitors fulfillment and automates feedback collection.
Designer templates — gives listings a professional and personalized look.
Shopping Site Feeds: Going Light for Less
In comparison-shopping site news, MechantAdvantage announced it's offering a Web-based "Lite" version of its Channel Management/Chanalytics software to eBay Stores and ProStores sellers, allowing them to expand marketing to new channels, according to the company.
The new "Lite" version is designed to allow online merchants to send, optimize and analyze the cost-effectiveness of their catalog feeds to over 100 shopping destination sites. The roster includes Amazon.com, Shop.com and Overstock.com and comparison-shopping engines such as Shopping.com, Become, Smarter, PriceGrabber, PriceRunner, Shopzilla and Yahoo! Shopping.
Web shop owners can also adjust product feeds and marketing language across marketing channels immediately, track performing and nonperforming channels, storefronts, categories and individual SKUs within each channel and determine which pay-per-click and revenue-based marketing campaigns are cost-effective.
Channel Management/Chanalytics Lite is now available for $99 per month exclusively for eBay Stores or ProStores Web Stores, a discount of $50 per month from its introductory rate, and there are no transaction or revenue fees.
Next-Generation Search: Finding a Friendly Pal
In other news, TheFind.com announced the launch of paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built specifically to let consumers browse products exclusively from merchants who accept PayPal payments.
Products will be shown to PayPal customers as what TheFind.com describes as visually compelling catalog-like images rather than as text links or thumbnail images. Unlike traditional comparison-shopping sites, merchants will not have to pay for their products to appear in search results on paypal.thefind.com. Instead, products from PayPal merchants will be indexed and become part of the natural search results.
For sellers, additional advertising opportunities outside of the algorithmically ranked results will be available. These identified "sponsored" areas will provide Web shop owners the ability to showcase additional promotional or branding messages to PayPal customers, while making it clear that those results are paid placements.
Marketworks and Amazon Merchants Shake Hands
Finally, Marketworks, a multi-channel e-commerce software provider, recently integrated Amazon.com's Merchants program into its platform.
Marketworks' automated features reduce the amount of time required to list, manage and process sales from multiple online channels, including the seller's own Web store, eBay and now Amazon. Regardless of where orders are generated, they can be processed and managed in the same way.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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