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 ion 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.

Applications developed by third parties, in effect, extend the eBay brand to other channels and marketplaces. It’s similar to programs already in place at Amazon, which offers web services hooks so third parties can embed the Amazon engine in their own commerce sites.

When it opened its developers program, eBay set charges because it wanted to ensure that developers used its resources efficiently, because each application developed ultimately executes on the eBay infrastructure. Its now-discontinued fee schedule ranged from $1.25 to $2.90 per thousand calls to the eBay engine, and annual membership fees ranging from $500 to $5,000.

“Free access is not commonplace,” claimed an eBay spokesman, who noted that other aggregator sites might offer limited free programs, such as specifying a ceiling to the number of no-charge transactions, or limit free access to non-commercial use. For instance, that’s what the Amazon search subsidiary Alexa Internet Services does. It charges $0.00015 for each hit to the search engine beyond the 10,000-free transaction per month threshold.

However, by contrast, Amazon does not charge for use of web services interfaces to its core merchant site. Instead, it incentives such as customer referral commissions. Amazon boasts that over 120,000 developers have registered for its web service program since it was launched in July 2002. Consequently, eBay has taken the hint, and is throwing off charges to spur adoption. Over the past year, the eBay developer network has more than doubled to roughly 20,000, accounting for 22% of listings on the site.

In another announcement, eBay announced a developers challenge contest that will award prizes for best individual application and best collaborative open source applications. Winners could get $5000, Xbox 360s, or iPod Nanos, plus an all-expenses paid trip to demonstrate their app at the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference.

“The eBay Developers Program started in 2000, mostly by accident,” said Greg Isaacs, developer of the eBay Developers Program. “We found out that there were commerce sites out there using our infrastructure — basically screen-scraping HTML to use the eBay resources. So we started supporting development on the Java platform and other popular technologies for building web applications. We’ve since opened it up with web services over the last two years.”

Isaacs reports that 18,000 developers joined the program in the more than three years that eBay has officially offered it. In addition, more than 1500 applications are up and running, accounting for an extraordinary 70 million API calls a day.

“The way we see it,” said Isaacs, “eBay isn’t just providing a service — we’re providing a proven, robust global platform for e-commerce. And the way we know it’s robust is that we build our own front ends on the same infrastructure, using the same APIs and services.”

The eBay vision includes the whole applications ecosystem: eBay itself, its users and customers (whether Buyers or Sellers), and application developers. The eBay Developers Program and events like the eBay Developers Conference in San Jose are an outgrowth of this vision, a necessary link in the chain that sustains and grows this global platform.

The majority of participants in the eBay program work for small to medium-sized companies, averaging 10 to 20 developers per shop. Like eBay, the developers are capable of quickly evaluating opportunities and developing capabilities to enhance the value of the eBay platform — beyond just buying and selling goods.

Click here to read the entire article.

Click here to go to the eBay Developers Program.

As part of an effort to foster innovation and help developers more quickly and easily build applications using the eBay Web services platforms, eBay today introduced a new online forum for open-source developer collaboration.

Free to all eBay Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network members, eBay Community Codebase allows participants to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and sample applications, and collaborate on new projects and innovations.

The announcement was made at eBay’s fourth annual Developers Conference, where more than 500 developers gathered to share ideas and broaden their understanding of eBay and PayPal Web Services.

Link to the entire Linux Insider article here.

Linux ROCKS!!! Ahem. Just my personal opinion.

Another link about this here from BetaNews.

eBay has launched a new Web site intended to help developers create applications for the auction site and its PayPal online payment service.

At the Web site, dubbed eBay Community Codebase, developers will have access to source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and sample applications, as well as provide a way to more easily collaborate on projects with others.

Link to the entire article here.

Web marketplace eBay Inc. said on Wednesday it named Edward Barnholt, the former chairman, president and chief executive of Agilent Technologies to its Board of Directors.

Barnholt led Agilent through its spin-off from Hewlett-Packard Co. in 1999.

He joined HP in 1966 and was named president and CEO of Agilent in March 1999. In November 2002, he was named chairman of the board at Agilent. He retired his posts on March 1.

In case you haven’t realized it yet, eBay is a platform.

That is, it’s not just an online service where people buy and sell. It’s also a back-end system enabling merchants to make sales without requiring buyers to be on eBay.com — a back-end system on which developers can create applications to facilitate and expand the process. And a system in search of more developers.

Link to Christopher Saunders’ complete article here.

More and more people every year turn to online shopping to avoid the crowds, the hassle, and the time involved in selecting and purchasing gifts. CNN’s Renay San Miguel spoke with consumer tech guru Marc Saltzman for tips on finding a gift on eBay, the largest online auction site.

You can read the complete interview here.

eBay’s security will be the dominant issue at this weekend’s meeting of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) in Atlanta.

“The single most salient issue among PESA members is security,” said David Yaskulka, PESA Marketing chairman, in an interview. “PESA wants more stringent identification of both buyers and sellers.”

Citing the growing incidence of phishing and scams, Yaskulka said PESA members realize that safety and security of online auctions are tough and growing challenges, but the organization wants to work with online auction providers to improve security.

Find out more about PESA at this web site.

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