eBay unveils numerous APIs for sellers
eBay is marking the 20th anniversary of its developers program with new APIs designed to aid activities including payments, customer service, and marketing.
The e-commerce giant is releasing APIs (or application programming interfaces) designed to help third-party developers create buying and selling experiences on its platform. As a payment agreement with PayPal expires in July 2020, eBay is rolling out its new managed payment process in a phased approach, starting in the U.S. and Germany with plans to expand to the U.K., Australia and Canada later this year and full global rollout by 2022.
Managed payments provide sellers with a more streamlined checkout experience with a single dashboard and end-to-end transaction and payment managed by eBay, eliminating third-party payment processing fees. Buyers will be able complete their checkout experience from desktop or mobile devices, and can select from a variety of payment options, including credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay.
New API capabilities around eBay’s managed payments include an account API which checks whether a seller is eligible for eBay managed payments, a fulfillment API that breaks down taxes and fees and manages buyer-initiated payment disputes, and a finances API which provides insights into financial activities on the platform for sellers enrolled in eBay managed payments. Support for active cross-border listings for sellers enrolled in managed payments is coming in August.
Other APIs and enhancements eBay will release include:
- A marketing API that supports promoted listings France, Italy, Spain and Canada;
- A customer service metrics capability in the analytics API which retrieves metric and benchmark data as well as the overall seller rating to understand if a seller is are meeting buyers’ customer-service expectations;
- A capability to surface listings at risk for becoming non-compliant against eBay aspect listing policies in the compliance API;
- Addition of an expected required date for item specifics to the taxonomy API;
- A new feed API in our portfolio that enables sellers to upload input files and download reports and output files;
- Support for auctions, charitable donations, secondary category, scheduling listings and specifying availability across warehouse locations to the inventory API.
eBay is also rolling out enhancements across its buy APIs. Global shipping program import charges, coupons, auto-spelled keyword corrections, eBay guaranteed delivery and eBay Plus eligibility are enabled in the browse API. The new buy-side deal API allows sales event discovery and retrieving items associated with such events or other deals on eBay.
And a translation API supports new language pairs and HTML markup in item descriptions. The machine translations are based on in-house trained models and state-of-the-art algorithms optimized for the ecommerce context.
“APIs, or application programming interfaces, at eBay are the front door to our global marketplace platform,” said Tanya Vlahovic, lead public API architect at eBay. “They enable our business to expand into new contexts, allowing third-party platforms to extend their value proposition while also bringing their customers to us. We give our developers data and capabilities at scale, and in turn they invent and create fantastic buying and selling experiences for their users.”