eBay Partners Now a Vibrant Channel
Published March 14th, 2006
For many eBay users, the online marketplace is a place to find a bargain or offload items they no longer need. But for thousands of people, eBay has become a way of life.
Those people include some 25,000 software developers that have built businesses around providing better tools for eBay sellers and buyers.
These application developers essentially constitute a partner channel that came about by accident. Shortly after eBay came on the scene with its auction site, developers wanting a piece of the action started popping up.
At first they were nothing more than scraggly pockets of weeds in the vast and varied field of application development, but today they are an intricate ecosystem that continues to grow.
In providing layers between sellers, eBay and buyers, the application developers pick up where San Jose, Calif.-based eBay leaves off.
They write applications that allow hawkers, peddlers and merchants a more granular approach to researching what to sell, when to sell and how much to expect for the sale.
Applications sift through historical sales data, gather statistics and organize the data in meaningful ways.
Some applications handle inventory and order management, and offer reporting capabilities that allow users to keep track of such data as pricing and volume.
These applications are especially useful to sellers that list thousands of items, said Greg Isaacs, director of eBay’s developers program. Without them, sellers would have a hard time tracking inventory and managing their sales.
Sellers taking advantage of the applications in many cases are anything but casual eBay users.
“A vast majority of my customers are using eBay as their primary business platform,” said Dave Cotter, CEO of Mpire Corp., an eBay-affiliated developer in Seattle that boasts more than 10,000 customers.
Cotter founded Mpire in December of 2004 specifically to develop applications for the eBay platform. The company helps small businesses determine the best time to sell specific items and, using historical data, figure out how much to expect to earn from the sale and what the starting price of an auction should be.
Using Mpire’s search and listing capabilities is free to sellers, but the developer charges for its more high-end tools, including financial reporting, consignment management and monitoring of active listings, Cotter said.
Cotter and other developers say eBay has made it easy for partners to work with the company, even making the API that developers need to build their applications available for free last fall.
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