Updated docs: Unpaid Item Dispute process

Around the time version 637 of the Trading API was released, changes went into effect for the Unpaid Item Dispute process.

The Unpaid Item Disputes documentation now reflects these changes.

http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/XML/docs/WebHelp/Disputes-.html

Please compare the older/newer diagrams, and review the comparison table that lists older/newer processes and timelines.

John Darrow
API Tech Docs and Tools

Join us in welcoming Sri Shivananda to the Developers Program

Hi everyone,

I'm Kumar Kandaswamy, and I'm pleased to announce that we've named a new leader for the eBay Developers Program. Sri Shivananda, an experienced eBay veteran, was recently named Senior Director of Platform at eBay. In this role, Sri leads the eBay Developers Program as well as the Tech and Application Platforms. I will continue my involvement with the program and will be reporting into Sri, who will set the strategy for the teams.

We were lucky enough to get Sri when Half.com acquired Deja.com in Dec 2000. Since then he has worked in various engineering roles at the company including roles in operations, product development and architecture—the most recent of which was as head of Architecture.

During his time in architecture, he worked on helping create new solutions for various business & technology features while architecting for scalability, availability and reliability at Web scale. In this role, he was responsible for driving the technology strategy of the eBay marketplace. In addition, over the last 9 months, he has been a strong advocate at eBay to create features as re-usable services.

One fun fact about Sri, he's multi-lingual. He understands 5 languages, speaks & reads 4, and writes 2. So feel free to drop him a line to say "bonjour."

I know I speak for the entire program when I say that Sri is a great addition to the team, and we look forward to working with him to make this the best time yet for developers building applications with eBay's API platform.

With that, I'll introduce Sri.

--  Kumar Kandaswamy

Excited about joining the eBay Developers Program

Hi all,

I'm Sri Shivananda, Senior Director of Platform at eBay, and the new head of the eBay Developers Program. I've been admiring this program from afar and I'm thrilled to be able to join Kumar and the rest of the folks here who have made this program a success. We're up to almost 100,000 members now! I look forward to meeting you all and working with you to ensure your success.
 
Since I'm new to this role, I'm going to hold off on announcing any new plans until I've had a chance to speak with developers and make sure I'm making the best decisions for the program and your opportunities with the eBay marketplace.

What I can share is that I am 100% behind the vision that Mark Carges provided in the eBay DevCon 2009 Keynote we hosted here at our headquarters in San Jose. That vision is to speed innovation and continue to support the platform to enable more flexible development for internal eBay developers and for API developers like you.

As an example of what we're working on, we recently launched Selling Manager Applications that provided third-party developers direct contact to sellers looking for useful tools to grow their businesses and make them successful.

I'd love to hear your questions and comments, and I invite you to drop me an email to introduce yourself at sri AT ebay DOT com or follow me on Twitter @srishivananda.

Thanks and I look forward to working with all of you!

Sincerely,
Sri Shivananda

Video Interview with 2009 eBay Star Developer Award Winner Seller Machine CRM

"It's not just the one DSR -- if you fix that one {customer communication} DSR, then all the other ones just follow. Once you've built a relationship with that buyer, then they go out of their way to leave 5 stars every time."

-- E.J. Bantz of BengalOne on how eBay sellers can boost their detailed seller ratings

Bantz joined us in June for the eBay Developers Conference 2009 at eBay's campus in San Jose to discuss his recent win in the highly coveted DSR Rockstar category of the eBay Star Developer Awards. The detailed seller rating system is based on a one-to-five-star scale. Five stars is the highest rating, and one star is the lowest.

Bantz discusses how he learned about the demand for his Seller Machine CRM tool as a seller on eBay. His Seller Machine CRM tool was built on the simple discovery that when sellers monitor when packages are received and follow up with buyers in e-mail after they receive their package, you build a relationship that positively impacts all of your DSRs and saves you a lot of hassle. "What I was finding as a seller was that if I could be more proactive in my customer service, then I ended up reducing the number of negatives I would receive."

Watch our interview with E.J. filmed on location at eBay DevCon below (clip is 5:32 in length).

- Delyn

eBay Architecture talk on the eBay API Platform @ SDForum, 10/28 in Palo Alto

Join Farhang Kassaei, eBay's Lead API platform architect on Wednesday, October 28th, @ 6:30pm in Palo Alto for a talk on  the technical challenges and issues solved to create the latest updates to the eBay API Platform, hosted by SDForum.

Participation is one of the important principals of Web 2.0. To encourage participation often Web 2.0 sites adopt an "open" strategy: Allow your developers to build the application for your end user. Architecturally, this approach is radically different than the traditional architecture where the entire site is built, deployed and operated by an internal team. Some of the aspects of architecture that should be examined in any open architecture are:

1.Overall System Architecture

2.Deployment

3.Development Cycle and Testing

4.Dependency Management and Graph

5.Security

6.Performance

7.Domain Specific API

8.Events and Messaging

9.Internationalization

10.State Management, Data Access

This talk will focus on how eBay dealt with these challenges when it opened its Selling Manager Applications platform to developer community. Get details about the talk here. Join Farhang at SDForum on 10/28!

- Delyn

637 Trading, Shopping, Client Alerts, Merchant Data API Docs Now Available

Please remember to use a test environment when updating applications to use a new schema version.

To find out when a version of the API will be available, see the table at the top of the Release Notes for that API.

You can find the latest API documentation at the eBay Developer Documentation Center.

Sellers can now revise live multi-quantity listings with sale

As announced, sellers can now edit almost everything in live multi-quantity fixed price listings even after a sale on the item, except for title, category, duration and format. If you need to add quantity, modify the item price, edit the description, modify shipping costs etc, you don’t need to end and recreate the listing. You can simply revise your live listings. Buyers who had previously bought the item will have an option to see the earlier version of the listing.

For developers looking for new revenue opportunities, consider building feature-rich revision tools. Sellers are searching for listing revision tools that help them identify which listings need to be revised, regardless of which tool launched the listing. For easy policy compliance updates, we recommend all listing tools offer listing revisions, including multi-quantity fixed price items with a sale, with a quick way for sellers to determine which listings need revision. Or build a new revenue stream by building a query and revise tool, for easy search and replace on any parameter (even return value = null).

Developers will want to update their code to retrieve a particular version of a listing for proper reconciliation and dispute resolution purposes.

Developer Impact:
No code change is necessary to edit these listings, but any developer blocking these types of edits should remove such a block. Revisions can be done using any existing revise API call including ReviseItem, ReviseFixedPriceItem, ReviseInventoryStatus. Be sure you are using ReviseFixedPriceItem or ReviseItem so no additional seller fees are incurred (i.e. when using RelistFixedPriceItem). Revisions on multi-quantity fixed priced listings with a sale will still be blocked if a seller tries to edit title, category, duration or format.

When retrieving listings, a new Transaction ID field was added to GetItem on release 627 and GetItemTransactions on release 635 to return a specific version of the listing. If no transaction is specified, the latest version will be returned. Changes to the GetItemTransaction API call may cause a change to the behavior of several Platform Notifications. GetSellerTransactions will return the snapshot of the item as it was at time of transaction on release 635. Read the Release notes for more information.

Resources:
Release notes
ReviseItem
ReviseInventoryStatus
ReviseFixedPriceItem
GetItem
GetItemTransactions
GetSellerTransactions

New Best Match API: What's your rank?

Today, we are pleased to announce that the Best Match Item Details API is available. You can use this new API to help sellers answer the following questions:

• Where is my listing appearing in search results when sorted by Best Match?
• How is my listing performing?
• What listing attributes help or hurt my listings rank?
• What can I do to improve my listing's rank?
• How do listings on page one of search results compare to my listing for a given search?

Best Match is the default sort order for search results on eBay. The goal of Best Match is to help buyers find what they're looking for, from sellers they trust.

Using the Best Match Item Details API, you can write applications that help sellers improve the Best Match rank of their listings. Additionally, you can enable sellers to view their items' click-through rates, their impression count range, and their items' sales per impression. An impression occurs on a listing when a user sees a search results page that contains the listing.

eBay also is releasing the Search Visibility tool, available in My eBay for sellers who can access the Seller Dashboard.

The Best Match Item Details API provides extra functionality that is not available in the Search Visibility tool. However, before you write an application, please note the information returned by the Search Visibility tool. For example, note the values returned for an item in the tool's Search Visibility Report. The values correspond to some of the values returned in a getBestMatchItemDetails response.

For more information about the Best Match Item Details API, see the Release Notes.

eBay Giving Works lowers minimum donation to $1, extends automatic collection date

Starting October 1, the eBay Giving Works minimum donation will be reduced from $5 to $1 per successful listing. In addition, the automatic collection date for donations will be extended from the second Monday after a listing ends to the fourth Monday after a listing ends.

The lower minimum donation will make it more affordable than ever for sellers to get the cause marketing benefits of eBay Giving Works. The extra two weeks before automatic donation collection gives sellers more time to receive their funds from PayPal and the buyer, before MissionFish collects the donation. (As always, donation minimums and collections dates do not apply to nonprofits selling on eBay to raise funds.)

If you have questions about these changes — or want to learn how to offer eBay Giving Works to your users — please contact MissionFish, eBay’s nonprofit partner. For information on how to use the API with Giving Works, see the API Docs.