There was a lot of news coming out of two major ecommerce events last week. The Internet Retailer conference took place in Boston. Chairing the Small Retailers track on Tuesday gave me an opportunity to hear firsthand the challenges and successes of online sellers. Today's issue features a recap of the event, including important news revealed by eBay Senior Vice President and General Manager of eBay North America and Global Platform Stephanie Tilenius, who was a featured speaker at the event.
eBay's Developer's Conference took place last week at eBay headquarters in San Jose where it preached the benefits of developing on its new Selling Manager Applications platform. The eBay Developers Program had extensive coverage of DevCon on its blog, including video interviews with participants.
eBay CEO John Donahoe told attendees in the DevCon keynote address that the company is prepared to invest whatever it takes to enable the eBay platform to accelerate and adapt to market and industry changes, and CTO Mark Carges outlined eBay's top technology priorities, which are Search, Catalog, User Experience, and Platform.
eBay announced that its new Finding API that enables developers to access eBay's next generation search capabilities will be available late this week, you can check this week's AuctionBytes Newsflash for all the news from the eBay DevCon.
In addition to the Internet Retailer conference roundup, today's issue also features an article by Greg Holden on the Silkfair online marketplace and storefront service, along with our usual columns including First Item Sold Online, Collector's Corner, This & That, and Letters from Readers.
In two final bits of news, eBay is closing down its liquidation source for PowerSellers called Reseller Marketplace effective June 30, 2009. I'll be reporting more details in tomorrow's AuctionBytes Newsflash newsletter.
And David's prediction about Google Product Ads is coming true. Back in November, David wrote an essay on how Google could leverage its services to serve up ecommerce-enabled ads across its ad network. His name for the then hypothetical ads was "Google ProductAds."
On Friday, Google Blogoscoped revealed that Google was beta testing "Google Product Ads." Google is running a test in which a small number of searchers will see ads for actual products - including photo and pricing information - on Google.com search results. (See also Brier Dudley's column in the Seattle Times.) The ads are generated through a merchant's Google Base feed.
David's vision went one step further than what Google is currently testing - he imagined Google including a Google Checkout button in the Product Ads, so shoppers could actually make a purchase right on the search results page (or on publisher pages across the Internet). So stay tuned, Google's new ads may be even more powerful than they first appear.
Thanks for reading.
