eBay Product Roadmap

Adam Trachtenberg, the Director of Product Management, Platform & Service at eBay, announced the eBay Web Services Product roadmap for eBay. The key current and new features include:

Cross-Merchandizing Service - a platform that enables selling products using the brand of another and promotes contextually relevant products based on Geography, buying/search history or user profile; which creates interesting shopping experience.
Cross-Merchandizing Service uses eBay’s new 'Services' framework, which is slightly different from the older APIs as below:
http://svcs.ebay.com/Merchandising?
  OPERATION-NAME=getMostWatchedItems
  &SERVICE-VERSION=1.0.0&CONSUMER-ID=YOUR-APP-ID
  &RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT=XML&maxResults=20&categoryId=267

Client Alerts - a light-weight, near real time notification delivery mechanism that allows developers to build cool, innovative client-side buyer applications. The client SDKs supports C++ and JavaScript technologies. 

eBay Trading SDKs - starting with the July release the eBay SDK for .NET will support .NET Framework 2.0, and .NET framework 1.0 will be deprecated since Microsoft has retired it. SDK for JAVA will migrate to JAXB data binding per the JAX-WS standard, and along with this migration, eBay SDK for Java will support JDK 1.5 and JDK 1.6. We will drop support for JDK 1.4 and customzed Axis 1.1.

Large Sellers Improvements - eBay Web Services will provide better API and business process support for large sellers:

1. Faster processing and fewer timeouts with asynchronous bulk interface
2. Manage entire business without going to My eBay
3. Ability to organize information by SKU instead of ItemID

Product Changes -

Overall Goals for Product Changes:
Making eBay Better: Create a first-class buyer experience and trusted marketplace 

Improving the Buyer Experience: Number of recent policy changes to improve the overall buyer experience

• Shipping: all items must specify at least one domestic shipping service.   We strongly suggest you pass weight and dimensions for our shipping calculator
• Handling time: All sellers must include a handling time on how long it will take for item to be shipped to the customer in the listing
• Return Policy: All sellers must specify in your listings whether or not you offer a return policy
• Payments: Provide buyers with a consistent, safe checkout experience every time they shop to increase buyer confidence and decrease online fraud

Making eBay Safer

• Anonymous Member E-mail Addresses: 'Anonymize' email addresses sent through the Member-to-Member communication system
• Item Templates and Description: Improve the safety of View Item pages by not allowing unsafe code in the page (will impact JS and Flash widgets)
• Links Policy: No links off eBay
• Trusted Selling With Identity Confirmation

We are really excited about these announcements since these address the needs of the eBay developer community. Adam will host an eBay Platform Roadmap & Panel Discussion session on 10:00 Tuesday, and you can take this opportunity to tell us on what the changes will impact to what you are doing and how we can improve things.

If you missed the Roadmap session, it will be repeated Wednesday morning.