EBay Extends an Olive Branch
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A month after its unpopular price hikes, the auction site seeks to smooth some ruffled business feathers. Also: Kuwait blocks radical websites to combat terrorism.... Google loses a legal round in France.... and more.
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If eBay is a political hot potato, maybe you should pass the sour cream.
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A brand new year and already so much to purge. It is time for eBay, that all-season national yard sale. But who wants to put up with the annoyances of holding an eBay auction?
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Defunct format sell-off eBay said today it expects to an increase in listings for HD DVD products following Toshiba's announcement yesterday that it is going to ditch its optical disc format.â¦
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Online auction house eBay goes the traditional route for the holidays.
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Caveat emptor for unwary bidders Buyers unable to wait until Friday are looking to hundreds of eBay auctions to get their hands on Apple's latest Newton-a-like - but many of the auctions are fakes and scams, prompting eBay to tighten its restrictions on sales of the much-desired handset.â¦
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eBay is back on Google, but this is far from a mutually satisfying ending.
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Online auction powerhouse eBay Inc. has scooped up Dutch classifieds Website Marktplaats.nl as part of an effort to expand its classifieds trading activities and grow internationally, it said Thursday.
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EBay announced Thursday that it will keep its Half.com subsidiary open indefinitely, scrapping previous plans to shutter the e-commerce site in mid-October.
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eBay launches a new marketing campaign that hits close to home.
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Blog: eBay takes the top spot as a Web services provider although Microsoft continues to maintain developer loyalty.
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The latest rumor to sweep the world of high tech claims that Microsoft has its eyes on eBay for a possible buyout. Last week, a report in the New York Post said that Microsoft has engaged in preliminary talks with eBay about acquiring the online auction company and merging it with MSN.
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EBay Inc. offered about &#36;530 million to buy the remainder of South Korean affiliate Internet Auction Co. Ltd. as it pushes deeper into Asia, saying key shareholders had accepted a 79 percent increase to an earlier offer.
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InfoWorld - EBay has big plans to provide more programming tools like new SDKs and APIs to its community of about 45,000 third-party developers.
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EBay, the world&#39;s largest Internet auction house, is making a purchase of its own, increasing its stake in South Korean affiliate Internet Auction.
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(InfoWorld) - EBayÂ is on a drive to put its brand everywhere people experience the Internet, and it wants outside Web developers to help get it there. The strategy is a new one for a company that has emphasized its robust e-commerce transaction system in opening itself up to heavy-selling affiliates, and currently gets about a quarter of its listings from big sellers using third-party tools to connect into eBay's backend. Now the online auction giant wants to reach more buyers where they live, and is hoping developers will take advantage of lighter and faster interfaces to carry its flag to the user. "We need to shift our attention to supporting the buying experience," said Max Mancini, senior director of platform and disruptive innovation at eBay, in an interview at the company's developer conference in Boston this week. The new APIs (application programming interfaces) don't require authentication to acquire information from eBay and display it within other applications or Web pages, removing a significant obstacle to casual use of eBay listings for their information or entertainment value. The so-called "shopping APIs" are also up to 16 times faster at returning search results, eBay says. The company also released a bidding API that developers can use to allow bidding from other applications and sites, and established support centers for developers working in JavaScript and Flash, popular for interactive, customer-facing sites and applications. In putting together a suite of tools that will help spread its presence into blogs, social networks and deeper into the Web 2.0 world, eBay is acknowledging what eBay Marketplaces President John Donahoe called "an explosion of easy to use starting points." In pushing the eBay experience closer to users -- and making it easier for third parties to get information from the marketplace without necessarily engaging in transactions -- is the company risking its relationship with buyers? Donahoe said he isn't worried about that. "It's the opposite of disintermediation, it allows them to engage directly with eBay on their own terms, and in the mode and device they want," he said. That emphasis on the buy-side can also be seen in the company's recent acquisition of StumbleUpon, which has developed a Web browsing tool that uses user preferences and community ratings to recommend content. "We thought it was a cool technology," said Donahoe in an interview, adding that it fit into eBay's goal of improving the search and find experience. "We want to find ways to have search be more entertaining." EBay's efforts to get more face-time with buyers also include a new connected desktop application code-named San Dimas that opened for beta testing this week. Built using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) tool, the downloadable application stays with users even when they are offline and gives eBay a "constant presence on the desktop" according to Donahoe. San Dimas also provides a kind of innovation laboratory, he said, giving eBay a place where it can experiment with changing the buyer experience without disrupting the millions of users comfortable with the status quo. AIR lets eBay provide a buying experience through San Dimas that's not constrained by browser functionality, the aspect of the project that is most exciting to Alan Lewis, the manager of platform evangelism who was demoing the application in Boston. Other developers could similarly use eBay's Web services to build a desktop application with AIR, and eBay is working with Adobe to pull together a code library to ease the process. Developers can also look forward to tools, coming later this year, that will help them scale their eBay applications, Mancini said. And it's possible that Web developers will see a simpler package of tools aimed at all three of eBay's core pieces -- the auction market, Skype and PayPal -- in the second half of the year, another company source said. Meanwhile in Boston, the focus was as much on promoting entrepreneurship as it was on coding tools, and developers seemed to be in that mindset. One young attendee from Japan described his objective as prospecting for business opportunities in the interfaces that eBay has opened up, and he said he was taking advantage of the conference to find out how other businesses are making money from the leverage that eBay is offering. For its part, eBay seems focused on giving entrepreneurial coders the tools -- and seeing how deeply into the social networking fabric of Web 2.0 independent developers can weave the eBay logo.
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PayPal, eBay Inc.&#39;s (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) online payment service, will expand its US buyer protection program to cover up to $1,000 for qualified transactions, the company said on Thursday.