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EBay Drops Charges for Developers Network

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the free-does-seem-to-be-more-popular dept.

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."

5 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Does anybody use Ebay anymore? by 0110011001110101 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I seem to remember in 1998, I made my first eBay purchase, and it was a fantastic deal. Great stereo receiver, fantastic price, easy transaction and no headaches... it still works great to this day.

    Anymore if I happen to hop on eBay, all I see are hundreds (if not thousands) of the same HOT TICKET, LIMITED AVAIL, CANT FIND THIS ANYWHERE regurgitated items being sold over and over again to the public and over-inflated prices (dont even get me started on shipping at ebay).

    It's less and less a viable place to do business, as a consumer or a retailer, as the site is flooded with the same crap, mostly imitations, be hawked as hard to find, rare items that are actually useless junk. I don't even want to start talking about all the dam *FAKE* items out there, where you can buy INFORMATION leading to a purchase...

    I'm done with you eBay.

    --
    Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
  2. EBay Drops Charges for Developers Network by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

    Oh, wait...

  3. Codebase Link by GreggyBUIUC · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since its not in the headline:

    https://www.codebase.ebay.com

  4. I snipe because by lorcha · · Score: 5, Interesting
    of the phenomenon that you mention. That people don't enter their maximum price when they bid like they are supposed to.

    Instead, they follow one of the following models:

    1. The emotional bidder: Bidding is war to this person. He bids and each time he is outbid he bids some more. He gets so caught up in the bidding that he doesn't realize he's paying 150% of retail for a used item and 200% of what he thought he was willing to spend on the item at all.

      Sniping helps deal with this problem by not allowing an emotional bidder to raise his bid once he is outbid. If he had truly entered his max bid like he was supposed to, and if his max bid is more than my snipe, then he's winning the auction anyway. But if he failed to correctly identify his max bid and my snipe is higher than what he entered, then I win and he can't get emotional about it. He should have bid properly to begin with.

    2. The minimum bidder: This person bids the minimum, gets outbid by the proxy system, bids the minimum again, and again, and again... then gives up. This drives up the price of the item unnecessarily, because the bidder was never serious to begin with.

      Sniping helps deal with this problem by not revealing my bid until it is too late for the minimum bidder to do his minimum bid cycle. He should have bid properly and entered his maximum bid into ebay, if he wanted to win. Instead, he just raises the price for me, which is not preferable.

    However, the biggest advantage to sniping has nothing to do with other bidders at all.

    Let's say that I want to buy a commodity item like a 1GB SD memory card. There are many auctions for such an item, which retails for about $60. Let's assume that I want to pay no more than $40 (~35% discount), but most auctions close for $45-50. Realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of auctions for 1GB SD cards, most of them end within one or two minutes of each other.

    How do you expect me to get my $40 SD card? I can't bid on one auction with 3 hours to go because I'll miss hundreds of auctions that close before the one that I bid on. And I can't bid on any of those hundreds of auctions that close earlier, because how will I know if I won the first auction? It hasn't closed yet! And I certainly do not need 2 SD cards. Just one. I can't even bid on an auction that closes in 10 minutes for the same problem.

    With sniping software, I group all the 1GB SD card auctions together, give it a maximum price including shipping, and then let it bid for me in the final seconds. It can see whether I won or not and if I won, it will quit bidding. If I lost, it will bid on the next one, and the next one, and the next one... until I win or realize that my price is too low and bump it up.

    I'm sorry if you think that I should sit in front of the ebay website all day and compulsively bid on each SD card auction, but I'm too busy compulsively hitting reload on the slashdot homepage, trying to get the coveted first post.

    --
    "Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
  5. What a litigious society we live in... by daVinci1980 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Was I the only one who read the headline and then tried to recall who EBay was sueing?

    --
    I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.