EBay Drops Charges for Developers Network

Rob writes "Seeking to make its presence in third-party rebranded commerce applications more ubiquitous, eBay Inc is lifting all of its API and transaction charges for developers. It's the latest action a series of moves to expand the eBay developer community. Last summer, the company opened up a collaborative website, the eBay Community Codebase, to provide a hosted project developer site for anyone willing to open source their code."

Comments

Codebase Link

[GreggyBUIUC]

Since its not in the headline:

https://www.codebase.ebay.com

Re:A huge win for everyone, just one more thing...

[Misch]

I've looked through their web services API specification and there's no automated bidding possible.

FAQ
We currently don't allow bidding through the general API. Although it is possible to look into that on a case by case approach. If you are interested contact [cut address] with some background information on your company and what you want to build.

Ebay Developers Contest

[hagrin]

In tangential news, Ebay is sponsoring a developer's challenge. Information can be found here:

Ebay Developer Challenge

The text from their release:
***eBay Developer Challenge 2006*** November 14, 2005 | 10:33AM PST/PT The eBay Developers Program, in conjunction with O'Reilly and Associates, is offering a contest for software developers. Winners will be selected in the Best Original Application and Best Open Source Collaboration categories. Prizes include $5,000 in cash, Xbox 360(TM) game consoles, iPod Nano(TM) music players, and the chance to demonstrate winning applications at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego from March 6-9, 2006. To learn more about the eBay Developer Challenge, please see our information page. To learn about the eBay Developers Program, please visit http://developer.ebay.com./

Lately, I've been using

[lorcha]

Lately, I've been using JBidWatcher. It has a multi-tab interface like firefox, so you can group auctions that way, automatic periodic searches, and the multisnipe functionality that I was describing. It'll even warn you if you attempt to do a "dangerous" multisnipe where the software wouldn't be able to determine if you won one auction before it had to bid on the next for you.

Oh, and it's OSS, of course. I run it on Linux, but I'm told it works fine on Windows as well.

I'm sure there are many other good ones out there. You may want to do a test snipe to make sure the software is actively maintained (ebay changes their HTML pages from time to time) and see how quickly your software can reliably do a snipe over your internet connection. You'll feel pretty stupid if your software and connection takes 3 seconds to execute a snipe and you set it to snipe with 1 second remaining. :-)

Re:Does anybody use Ebay anymore?

[duffbeer703]

EBay doesn't give a shit. I discovered a scam, which is still going on two years later, where theives would build webs of bogus accounts and buy/sell stupid shit like $0.99 recipies and similar items between accounts. I found one account that was buying 50-60 <$5 items a day for a few weeks. They leave comments like "Great TV, supar ebayer A++++++" and "Laptop shipped on time A++++++ ASSET TO EBAY" for rolls of yarn or supermarket coupons.

Then they stop all eBay activity.

And then the thief doesn't do anything for about 3-4 months. At that point a regular user cannot get any details on the users history... Then the guy starts selling nonexistent laptops, iPods, etc.