Developers gathered in Chicago are hearing more about eBay's plans to allow third parties to integrate applications directly onto its site. The eBay Developers Conference kicked off this morning, with a keynote address at 9:30 am central.

According to eBay, the move toward an open platform will give developers "unprecedented access to eBay's community of professional sellers, creating more opportunities for developers to market their tools and giving sellers a wider variety of sales optimization applications." Developers will be able to submit seller tools for inclusion directly onto eBay Selling Manager, an online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay. In the past, users had to seek out a little-known "Solutions Directory" in order to learn about third-party solutions. With Project Echo, the code-name for the initiative, interested subscribers will get a free, 30-day evaluation period to trial applications.

Over 28 percent of all eBay.com listings are launched with third-party tools, and over 700,000 sellers subscribe to Selling Manager. "By giving developers the opportunity to showcase their tools to eBay's most active sellers, eBay aims to help developers and sellers alike create new revenue streams and maximize their ability to make money through eBay," according to eBay's announcement (http://developer.ebay.com/echo).

Also announced at the conference, PayPal has introduced a new Developer Central portal. Scheduled to launch in July, it will offer a complete set of free business and technical kits to help developers market their services, identify customer leads, complete integration projects more easily, and share knowledge with community peers. PayPal also introduced new application programming interfaces (APIs) to give merchants more flexibility to manage their customer transactions. PayPal's new Recurring Payments API offers merchants more options for subscription billing. The new Reference Transaction API will enable merchants to more easily transact with their repeat customers.

More news is expected at eBay's annual user conference kicking off on Thursday. eBay is expected to roll out new search features onto the main site, such as its snapshot view feature that gives shoppers the option of viewing search results in a "window shopping" display (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y207/m09/abu0199/s04). It appears eBay is also planning to add more third-party advertising in more places on its site.

Keep up to date on all conference news by reading AuctionBytes conference coverage (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/ebaylive2008).

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