693 Trading and Shopping 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.

More Than 200K Subscribers to Open eBay Apps

The Open eBay Apps program now has more than 200K subscribers. And the number of eBay sellers that subscribe to the apps, which are embedded on the eBay site, is growing.

The numbers came from Tina Mazzei and Anand Gangadharan during a presentation at the PayPal X Developer Conference. I was excited to hear about the growth because I'm a contributor to the Open eBay documentation for developers. Tina explained to the audience that in the Open eBay program, "we bring the customers to you."

As Anand said, "eBay does a lot of the heavy lifting" for third parties. This includes handling marketing through the Apps Center and handling billing through PayPal.

The Open eBay apps include the new eBay Listing Analytics application, which is free.

Sellers use Open eBay apps right on the eBay.com site. Many of the apps reduce sellers' operational costs. For third parties who want to write Open eBay apps, "the most important part is to be a customer-centric provider," and earn good ratings, Anand said.  

Log Into Social Network Sites Using PayPal Login

The PayPal Identity Services session involved a collaborative effort from PayPal's Ashish Jain, Vidya Shivkumar from Janrain, and Dave Yovanno from Gigya.

Ashish described how it is becoming more and more cumbersome to manage so many login credentials online. The average Web user has 25 online accounts and logs into one of these accounts at least eight times a day. There is also a huge security risk involved since many people use the same one or two credentials for all accounts. If a malicious hacker gets just one of your login/password combinations, your critical private information is exposed, including access to online financial service and bank accounts.

Following identity standards set by OpenID, SAML, and OAUTH, PayPal is teaming up with Janrain to provide PayPal Identity Services. When a third-pary Website implements PayPal Identity Services, users of that Website can log in using their PayPal credentials. This eliminates some of the burden of managing so many credentials, and both the Website and the individual user gets the benefit of PayPal's strong validation, security and fraud system. And PayPal only delivers user information that is necessary for the third-party Website to have and use.

PayPal's partner in Identity Services is Janrain. Jahrain's Engage technology makes it possible for Web user to log into third-party Web sites using their PayPal Credentials.

Gigya's technology wraps popular social network APIs into a Website's single API. With this implementation and a few lines of JavaScript code, a third-party Website is able to:

• Register/login users through Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and others
• Get users’ social network profile data and friends list
• Post stories/tweets on users' walls and update their status

In future releases of PayPal ID Services, PayPal plans to add additional qualified data, integrate with Payments, and enhance the overall user experience.

 

 

Getting Started with Google App Engine

In an afternoon hands-on workshop, Chris Schalk and Ikai Lan from Google walked attendees through the process of creating a Google App Engine app. 250K developers are currently using App Engine to build and deploy apps to the cloud, and App Engine apps get 500 million page views per day.

App Engine developers can use a Python or Java environment. For Java developers, an App Engine Eclipse plug-in is available. With this environment, creating an app and deploying it to the cloud is a 3-step process that can be done in less than an hour.

The first step is to create an App Engine account. If you have a Gmail account, you can use these credentials to access App Engine. If you don't have a Gmail account, you can either create one or create a separate App Engine account.

Once you create an account, go to the main App Engine tutorial page at: https://sites.google.com/site/gdevelopercodelabs/app-engine From this page, developers have the option of following the Java or Python tutorials. Be sure to check out the tutorials to get more information on getting started with App Engine.

There are no setup fees to get started building App Engine apps, but developers are generally limited to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support arround 5 million page views per month. Anything above these constraints and charges may apply. Developers can control their resource limits, so they can stay within a development budget.

The slide deck for this presentation is available at: http://www.slideshare.net/cschalk/introducing-app-engine-for-business

Chris Schalk can be found on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/cschalk

Overcoming the Challenges of Cross-Platform Development

Overcoming the Challenges of Cross-Platform Development

 

This was a engaging town hall type session, featuring representatives from eBay, PayPal, and LinkedIn.

 

The following are some of the major bullet points of what was discussed today.

 

What products are PayPal doing?

 

Consumer Application

    Send/Invoince Money

    In-person payments via Bump

Merchant Checkout

    In app, rich authentication

    1-click payment, sign up and sign in

    Single Integration

    Auto-Detect mobile web

 

PayPal's global perspective

    Looking at trends worldwide

    Emerging markets is where mobile payments is taking off

 

Platform Survey

    iPhone

        Flagship platform for PayPal

        Easier for C/C++ & Mac developers

        Walled garden

            Good: Protected, unoform platform

            Bad: TOS causes confusion with every change

    Android

        Flagshio platform by 2011

        Easier for Java Developers

        Fragemtation - only going to get worse

        "Open Platform"

            Good: Flexible and adaptable

            Bad: Evolving security model

Mobile Web

    Mobile Web helps with portability

    Rendering technology helps with fragmentation

    Webkit has paved the way for great experience

    HTML5 brings rich experience

 

LinkedIn

    LinkedIn 3.0 for iphone launched this year

    Professionals are rarely at their desks

    In one year from now, the mobile web to be ubiquitous throughout various platforms

 

eBay

    Selling an item every second, selling 2-3 Ferrari's a month

    Upgrades to apps are being 100% adapted within a month of availability

    On all platforms via NetBiscuits

    1200 unique devices hit the mobile website per month

Churning out e-commerce apps with Salesforce.com

In a collaborative session, Cloud Conversion and Salesforce.com made the case for using Salesforce.com to develop e-commerce apps, including eBay and PayPal apps. The case: compared to the normal app development cycle, it's easier, cheaper, and simpler to develop, maintain, and adapt these kinds of apps using Salesforce.com.

Cloud Conversion uses Salesforce.com to build very adaptable apps that run in the Salesforce.com cloud. Salesforce.com's pre-built components shorten the dev cycle, because components like security and support for multiple languages, currencies, and devices are already built and available for the app to use. Cloud Conversion created eCommSource, which leverages Salesforce.com customer service and support to manage an eBay seller's subscribers.

Cloud Conversion likes the Salesforce.com IDE, too--it lets them assemble app components in a graphical interface.

Things to check out:

• Making PayPal apps with PayPal X Toolkit for Force.com
• Using Chatter to build e-commerce apps
• Creating an Open eBay app with Salesforce.com

Hackathon: Quick and Easy MPL Integration using Titanium JavaScript Developer

Take your JavaScript and generate native application for a variety of mobile devices, IOS, Android, etc. Less code and it's JavaScript FTW!

A Native Function call takes several lines of Titanium JavaScript code.

For developers, they can add an array of mobile commerce functionality for their apps quickly and easily.

It's easy as 1,2,3

Step 1: Include the PayPal library in your project and in your reference code

Step 2: Add a button

Step 3: Wire the PayPal button, to it's capability via PayPal payments

Start today, go to: http://www.appcelerator.com

PayPal Apps: Ready to Go

Open eBay Apps developers and other ambitious developers, take note: PayPal Apps is here and awaiting your apps. PayPal Apps uses the same OpenSocial gadgets framework you used for your Open eBay app, and the sandbox at X.com is open for experimentation.

Similarly to Open eBay Apps, PayPal apps run in IFrames within the PayPal interface, where they can be seen by PayPal users when the program is released.

After you get your app working in the sandbox at X.com, you can submit it to be reviewed by PayPal. The PayPal Apps team will vet your app's UI, reliability, and security, and support, and you're ready to launch.

What kind of apps are appropriate? Your PayPal app should be PayPal-adjacent, like the three that were demo'd today at PayPal X. Terapeak (a veteran presence in the eBay Apps Directory) is running a transaction history analytics app on PayPal now. Plastic Jungle has a gift card exchange app. Shipwire has an on-demand shipping and order automation app for merchants who use PayPal. All three apps are great fits with PayPal.

If you have an app idea, go get started with PayPal Apps here: https://www.x.com/community/ppx/paypal_apps.

eBay API fundamentals

In this session, we're learning about eBay's API's and what we can do with them.

The eBay API's are the largest eCommerce opportunities
90 million users
27 million sellers

Find and purchase irked
List items and manage inventory

API offerrings
Trading API: targeted to he seller
Large merchant services API: targeted to merchants with large volumes of inventory and transactions
Best Match: analyze areas of improvements, what is the competetition doing
Product Services: metadata service, create selling applications
Finding: find items on eBay
Platform notifications: an item sells, you find out
Client Alerts: make a Json request to pick up notifications
Open eBay Applications: embed your web applications right on the eBay production site

You can get started using the API's by going to developer.eBay.com

1. Sign up
2. Get your keysets
3. Create a user token

Remember that we also have great testing environment in the sandbox. Test your apps before they go live. It's free to list and buy your items on sandbox, take advantage of it!

You're ready to go!

Alphabet Soup = #custserv = $: Creating a CRM with IPN

Presented by Star Developer Award winner Chuck Hudson of Aduci (http://www.aduci.com/) in the Tech Playground supporting the concurrent #xinnovate hackathon.

IPN = PayPal Instant Payment Notification
CRM = Customer Relationship Management

Focus for this session: Transaction type = cart

Tip: Remove data order considerations from your parsing because different cart IPNs may have different ordering.

Using IPN to create a CRM is a simple and elegant as using IPN fields like txn_id, txn_type, payer_id, payment_status to segment on customer data and type of notice.

Start grouping and parsing customer data to see order trends and identify repeat customers. This is the start of a valuable CRM system.

IPN timestamps are returned in Pacific time. Recommend converting to UNIX time for easier manipulation.

Sometimes you can miss an IPN, so it's a good idea to do regularly reconcile individual IPNs with a history report. IPNs have unique transation IDs you can use to resolve duplicates.

Also watch out for special characters. Best practice: stip or substitute special characters before you start processing.

On http://developer.paypal.com, use the IPN generator tool to generate IPNs for testing and debugging.

Find code samples from the session here:
https://www.x.com/docs/doc-1523 (login required)