eBay has turned its subscription-based Selling Manager service into a platform that is now open to embedded third-party tools, currently in beta. eBay will take a 20 percent share of the fees vendors charge to sellers for using their applications. In return, vendors will get exposure to eBay sellers who use Selling Manager; eBay will bill sellers via PayPal and reimburse vendors their 80 percent.

Brian Haverty, who was Vice President of Business Development at HostedSupport until 2006, got a demonstration of the platform at Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday where eBay officially announced the beta program. "I'm pleased to see eBay has done something like this to support third-party providers," Haverty told AuctionBytes, saying it had been previously very difficult for vendors to reach sellers. Other than exhibiting at the annual eBay Live user conferences, vendors were on their own, he said - eBay did not supply leads to vendors.

eBay had announced its plan to open the platform at last year's Developers Conference, referring to it as Project Echo. But it was 2 years ago eBay first discussed the possibility of an open platform when Senior Director of eBay Research Labs Eric Billingsley gave a keynote address at the 2007 eBay Developers Conference.

Billingsley described plans to rebuild the eBay technology as a series of modular services called eBox rather than a single application. The component-based design would make it quicker to build applications by providing pre-built services that could be combined to create new applications without extensive coding.

He told ZDnet reporter Martin LaMonica at the time, "My dream is someday we have a perfect shopping experience for collecting glass monkeys in Vietnam. I want to create a market and a system that is so open and easy to build upon that that becomes actual reality - that we could put out a request for a feature and have someone build it for us for 500 bucks."

Terapeak is one of the companies that has been working with eBay on Project Echo, now called Selling Manager Applications Beta. Product Manager Denise Hogue said, "Terapeak is excited at the prospect of opening up marketplace research tools to a wider audience across the eBay platform. Since billing and access are both through eBay, users will be familiar with the look and feel of the interface and trust the services available, as each application will be approved by eBay before going live."

Hogue said, "We get a lot of feedback from our users, and one of the key issues we hear about is lack of time. We hope that by offering these tools directly on the eBay platform, we can help people run their businesses more efficiently."

eBay said over 87,000 third-party developers have built more than 13,000 live applications via the API. eBay's Selling Manager tool currently has 270,000 active, paying subscribers in the US, and the company said opening up the platform will make it easier for sellers to find and subscribe to many of these tools.

UPS is integrating its WorldShip software into Selling Manager "so sellers can manage shipping for their business directly within My eBay at no cost," according to eBay. Other companies who have been working with eBay on Selling Manager Applications Beta are HostedSupport, Terapeak, ahTEXT.com and Cloud Conversion.

Developers interested in building applications on eBay.com are required to meet site standards for trusted buying and selling experiences. Once approved, their applications will be available to sellers that subscribe to eBay Selling Manager, and they can monetize their applications with subscription-based revenue. Developers can join the beta and begin developing their eBay Selling Manager applications at http://developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications (link).

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