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The New Secret Sauce For E-Commerce

Posted by timothy on from the if-they-build-it-they-will-have-come dept.

prostoalex writes "The hottest e-commerce trend this year? APIs and opening up databases to outside developers, says Information Week. There are currently 50,000 software developers in Amazon.com Web Services program, while eBay enjoys the presence of 8,000 companies and individual developers in its API program. There are 30 million XML queries performed on eBay servers daily."

6 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. in other words... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    a company can automate their sales by utilizing amazon or ebay as way to market their product to their customers, rather than running an obscure sales website no one will ever visit. I think it's win-win. Amazon or eBay collects a small fee for the sale, the seller gets his product to a larger market faster, etc etc.

    1. Re:in other words... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is nearly identical to Microsoft's original business strategy, which is to form a kind of symbiosis with other companies' products. Other products actually did well because Microsoft did well, and vice versa.

  2. Yup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Certainly, this is an example of how giving people an authorized way to do things (here, access APIs) discourages them from doing them in a way you don't want (screen scraping). A lot easier than suing them and trying to convince a judge that screen scraping is somehow analogous to stealing car stereos.

  3. Auction Snipers? by wayward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The article says
    There also are risks to opening the technology vault. EBay has to contend with a legion of "auction snipers," Web sites that automatically enter preset bids during the waning seconds of auctions.

    Is this really much of a problem? Ebay itself has functionality that allows users to enter the maximum that they're willing to pay, and it auto-increments their bid based on this. Also, even if bid-sniping was a major issue, there have been scripts around for a long time that do this.

    1. Re:Auction Snipers? by Karma+Farmer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I suspect the biggest threat from "auction snipers" is to the sellers, not to the buyers.

      A perfectly rational buyer is going to enter a maximum bid amount based on what he or she thinks the item is worth and then be done with it. But, buyers are seldom "perfectly rational." Once someone bids on an item, the bidder forms an attachment to it -- when outbid, there's a competition with the other bidders. Bidders rationalize raising their previous "maximum price", because they really want the item, and "maybe it's worth more than I thought."

      This irrational behavior benefits the seller, because irrational people bidding more on an item than it's worth are a great way for a seller to make more money. This, in turn, benefits eBay because the sellers are happier.

      Conversely, the auction snipers benefit the buyers. The temptation to bid "just a little more" is removed. The reward system geared to unhealthy addictive behavior is gone. The bidder decides on a maximum rational amount, puts in a bid, and either gets the item or doesn't. It's perfect. Paradoxically, though, this makes the bidder unhappy. Bidders feel cheated, because they waited all the way to the end of an auction, feel soooo close to getting thier dream item, start to form an attachment, and the item is snatched away by a "sniper." Never mind that the sniper just paid more than the bidder thought the item was worth -- the bidder feels cheated, because he lost the opportunity to behave irrationally.

      Bid sniping makes both bidders and sellers unhappy. It costs the sellers money, and it cuts out the addictive feedback the bidder has grown to depend on.

  4. Re:Biz-Talk. by borkus · · Score: 3, Insightful


    Isn't this the way B2B and B2C works with things like WSDL, EDI, and web services?
    In technological terms, yes. However, most typical B2B arrangements are far from open - management meet and hammer out a contract, tech meet and hammer out interfaces and connectivity, etc. Even if the arrangement is only one company providing data to another, there is considerable interaction between both organizatons before exchanging data with one party paying the other for data. In all cases, the two parties only interact by agreement - usually in the form of a specially arranged contract.

    EBay and Amazon allow nearly anyone to connect to their services, Anyone can retrieve that data for free and use it to make themselves (as well as Amazon and Ebay) money. While there is a contractual arrangement between Amazon or EBay and the partner, it's generally a boilerplate contract that simply allows Amazon and EBay to prevent abuse.

    The advantage for EBay and Amazon is that they don't have to come up with interesting uses for their data - they simply encourage partners' ideas and both parties make money.