Developer Community Growing For EBayDeveloper Community Growing For EBay

The success of online auction site eBay Inc. is in part buoyed by contributions from one of the least-known developer communities around. Some 4,000 developers are building applications used by eBay buyers and sellers, who exchanged $23 billion in goods and services on the site last year.

EBay is working to broaden its developer base and last week said it will add integration capabilities for the Simple Object Access Protocol and Java Web-service technologies to its developers' kit during the second quarter; eBay already offers .Net and XML integration.

Many eBay developers work at small companies such as Andale, Auctionworks, and Channel Advisor that specialize in apps for auction management and sales automation. Now, larger software makers are getting involved: SAP is expected to introduce an application in April that will let customers automate the listing of excess or out-of-date inventory on the site. EBay is working with Microsoft developers to improve how Outlook and Excel interoperate with the site, and Logitech recently introduced an applet that lets sellers attach 60-second video clips to their listings.

The apps that developers are building for the eBay environment eventually could be used in other markets and provide vendors with additional license revenue, Delphi Group analyst Hadley Reynolds says.

The new Web-services capabilities from eBay will give Andale more development flexibility, says Prishant Nedungadi, Andale's chief technology officer. That will mean a better experience for eBay sellers, which represent about 80% of Andale's user base. "All roads lead to eBay," Nedungadi says. "And if they make their preferred-service providers successful, they make those roads smooth."

EBay will continue to invest in its developer community in an effort to improve the user experience, says Debbie Brackeen, director of the eBay developers' program. Says Brackeen: "There's going to be a much larger and richer set of applications to facilitate their buying and selling on the marketplace."