Scalability a Priority; eBay Wants Feedback from Developers

Lynn Reedy, CTO of eBay Marketplace, Product, and Technology, said in a keynote that eBay is architecting for future traffic on its platform equal to ten times the current volume. This includes the backend databases, which have to be “totally scalable.”

Reedy also took the opportunity to ask for feedback from developers. This request also was made by Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, who made a surprise appearance after Reedy’s keynote. Whitman said the week of the Developer’s Conference and eBay Live is her “favorite week of the year,” and third party developers have always played a central role in eBay’s evolution. She asked developers in the audience to please provide feedback to the eBay and PayPal employees they see at the conference.

Over the past couple of days here, developers have voiced concerns about whether the platform can handle large numbers of API calls and about how reliable the Sandbox is.

In Q4 of last year, Reedy said, there were about 4.4 million transactions per day on eBay. And in June of this year, there have been 42 million API calls per day. eBay needs to ensure that “a year from now, 2 years from now, 3 years from now,” the platform can continue to scale, she said.

In addition to architecting for scalability, the steps for the API that have been or soon will be taken include improving API caching and monitoring, improving the reliability of the GetAccount call, and the new schema, Reedy said. Additional steps are notification improvements and Sandbox improvements to further enable developers to test their applications, she said.

Developers “are a critical component to our mutual success,” and drive innovation, Reedy said. Opportunities for developers include Best Offer, a feature which has been successful in helping sellers increase business, and Want It Now, a popular feature that will be added to the API.

Posted by: Bert McMeen, eBay Developers Program