This week, as eBay continues to embrace and create awareness for its developer ecosystem, the company is kicking off its eBay Connect developer events. The first of seven global events are taking place at the company’s headquarters in San Jose. The event brings together eBay’s community of innovative and influential developers to introduce new APIs and updated features for the eBay platform. The updates follow last Fall’s announcement of ten new APIs.
“Over the past seven months, we’ve not only grown the number of registered developers who are part of our program, but our APIs have continued to accelerate selling and buying,” said Gail Frederick, Senior Director of eBay’s Developer Ecosystem and Services. “As a team, we have an API-first mentality - we’re taking a developer-centric model for delivering APIs. Working with third-party developers and launch partners to build and update APIs is important for eBay as we aspire to become the world’s most powerful selling platform, and a platform that developers love.”
This summer, conferences will take place in seven locations across the US, Europe and Asia. eBay’s global community of developers will share best practices and learn from API developers and product leaders. And, most importantly, developers will get a chance to hear into how eBay is leveraging its technology to make it easier for our developer ecosystem to create innovative new eBay experiences.
What’s New
Today, we are announcing new Commerce APIs, which is useful for buying and selling on eBay. The first capability in the Commerce APIs is the Taxonomy API. With this API, sellers get the category taxonomy for the eBay marketplace, and suggested categories. Sellers can also use this to organize their inventory. Buyers use the API to easily browse and discover what they are looking for.
We are also introducing a new Buy API, Buy Marketing API, which gives developers the best-selling products in a category, ranked by product demand metrics.
Over the summer, eight of our Sell and Buy API capabilities will be available globally.* On the sell-side, the APIs will enable easy listing management. On the buy-side, shoppers can purchase without ever having to visit eBay.
We are also adding new features through the various Sell and Buy APIs:
- Browse API - Buyer-driven search enhanced by providing more filters.
- Inventory API - A migration tool that provides a retail-standard inventory model for seller’s listings.
- Sell Marketing API -For the Promotions Manager capability, developers can choose inventory by category and other criteria. Also, a new reporting capability that enables sellers to use APIs to get performance reports for their promotions.
- Sell Marketing API -For thePromoted Listings capability, developers can get asynchronous performance reports for their promoted listings.
All of these updates can be found on the eBay Developer Portal. On the portal, we will be adding API usage reports for latest RESTful APIs, modern layout for API documentation and providing OpenAPI specifications for our RESTful APIs, allowing developers to generate client SDKs in over 40 programming languages.
eBay’s APIs By The Numbers
At the end of Q1 2017, the eBay Developer Program had 362,000 registered users across 190 markets. Through its APIs, eBay onboarded partners who leveraged both the Sell and Buy APIs, including: Chairish**, Snupps, WineDirect and SHIFTMobility**.
In Q1 2017, external developers used our public sell APIs to:
- Create more than 800M new listings in Q1
- Manage about 4x that number
- Drive more than $4.2B GMV globally
- Trading API call volume for 3P apps: 46B
- Trading API call volume for eBay apps (excluding 3Ps): 106B
- eBay Dev Program has more than 362K registered members
In Q4 2016 and Q1 2017, external developers used our public buy APIs to:
- Generate $17.9M of purchase volume
- # of transactions: 237K
* Available in select marketplaces.
**Announcements made in Q2 2017.
