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Web API Sites

December 6th, 2007

Shopping Mashups for the Holidays

Of the the 2565 mashups listed here just over 9% are tagged “shopping”. That’s 338 shopping mashups. Each week we see a variety of the 33 e-commerce APIs used for interesting forms of shopping applications and this past week’s been no exception. The e-commerce API segment is so active that we’ve created a new section of ProgrammableWeb: the Shopping Mashup Dashboard. This section of the site gives you one jumping off point for what’s new in APIs, mashups and news in the e-commerce platform world.

In terms of what’s new in the past week, here are 3 of the latest shopping-related mashups that might be able to assist you in getting ready for the gift giving season:

SearchQuilt: Search for videos, images, blogs, news, eBay auctions, and Amazon products all on one page. The homepage shows popular searches from Yahoo, AOL, Google, and Technorati, so that you can also track buzz (four different APIs used in this mashup).

Amazon and eBay Comparison Shopping: Search both Amazon and eBay at the same time from a single search form.

eBay Nintendo Wii Ticker Widget: If you are tired of looking for Nintendo Wiis then use this Google Gadget, a live ticker that displays Nintendo Wiis currently on sale via eBay.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Popular, Shopping, Site News, ebay at 1:06 AM | No Comments »

November 19th, 2007

eBay Serves 5 Billion API Calls Each Month

The first of the Web 2.0 APIs came from eBay back in November 2000 and they’ve come a long way in the 7 years since then. Our eBay API Profile is one of the most frequently visited on ProgrammableWeb. As you can see in this recent post from the eBay Developer’s Blog comes some interesting metrics:

Over 60,000 developers have registered as members of the eBay Developers Program, with 20,000 new members in the past year
Nearly 10,000 live applications – an increase of 17% in just the last quarter
60% of all eBay listings are listed through eBay services, of which about half come though 3rd parties
Over 5.7 billion API calls are made every month

And currently the most popular mashup listing on ProgrammableWeb uses the eBay API, the Wii Seeker mashup which finds retail addresses, locations, shipment dates, and local eBay auctions for the Nintendo Wii.

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Shopping, ebay at 12:36 AM | 2 Comments »

June 25th, 2007

eBay Tops Web 2.0 Developer Survey

eBay topped five other leading Web 2.0 developer programs including Yahoo, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Microsoft in a study published this month by Evans Data Corporation. The 34 page report entitled “Developer’s Choice: Web 2.0 Developer Programs” is based on a recent survey of 400 developers and is available at the EDC site, free registration required. For readers interested in this space it’s a worthwhile read. Some highlights:

Developers were asked about a range of factors including API functionality, developer support, documentation, certification, marketing assistance, security, downtime, solutions directories and tools.
The best overall rating went to eBay followed by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and PayPal respectively.
Even within a single provider’s program there was a wide range of satisfaction. For example Yahoo and Microsoft scored well in forums and blogs while PayPal and Amazon rated lower on these.
The financial benefits a program offers makes a big difference with eBay and Amazon scoring well here.

Here’s a quick overview of the strengths and weaknesses by vendor:

PayPal: Scored highest on security but did not fare well on forums and developer community.
Amazon: Scored highly on financial benefits but respondents gave Amazon lower marks on documentation and outages, which EDC notes is surprising and indeed may be a symptom of expectations more than anything else.
eBay: Had the most problems with outages and downtime as well as integration difficulty. They scored highly on financial benefits, support and documentation. Their APIs were voted best of the group.
Google: Rates well for ease of integration, good uptime, and tools. Google scored lower on financial benefit and in the middle on many of the metrics.
Yahoo: Scored highest in terms of ongoing communication and reasonably well on their APIs and their community services like forums. Yahoo is seen less highly in terms of helping developers make money.
Microsoft: Scored well on their developer community programs and tools but not so well on integration, direct financial benefit or marketing assistance.

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Posted by John Musser as BestPractices, Issues, ebay at 12:48 AM | 1 Comment »

June 14th, 2007

PayPal API Goes Mobile

The PayPal API has gone mobile this week with the announcement of PayPal Mobile Checkout. Using this new WAP 2.0-based platform mobile phone users can perform checkouts on mobile sites much like they do with PayPal on regular ecommerce sites. This picks-up from our report earlier this week on the new eBay APIs and shows how eBay is pushing their influential platforms in a variety of directions. Other PayPal platform news this week also includes a new certified developer program.

The PayPal API may not have the pop-culture appeal of the Google Maps API but it’s a key component of shopping as an API platform. Note that there are over 250,000 registered PayPal developers.

For some real-world examples you can see a sample of PayPal mashups in our listings including the online invoicing service Blinksale.

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Posted by John Musser as Mobile, Shopping, ebay at 12:04 AM | 2 Comments »

June 12th, 2007

eBay’s New APIs

eBay kicked of their eBay Developer’s Conference 2007 yesterday with a big set of product announcements. What’s new? From their announcement:

eBay Shopping Web Services: a suite of faster, more responsive APIs that makes searching on eBay significantly faster and allows developers to easily create buying applications
New JavaScript and Flash Developer Centers - making it easier for JavaScript developers to access the eBay Web Services platform; Flash Developer Center launches next month
eBay Bidding API - qualified developers can enable bidding on eBay from anywhere beginning in Q3
Call Limit increase - Production calls increased from 10,000 per month to ~150,000 per month (based on a daily limit of 5,000), allowing developers to rapidly scale up their applications
eBay Client Alerts - lightweight, near real-time alerts about platform activity launches limited beta releasing in Q4

As you can see on the eBay Developer Program Overview page they draw a clear distinction between the Shopping and Trading-focused APIs. The shopping APIs are designed for lightweight, read-only, search and buying REST-style functions that don’t require a token. In terms of performance these services are up to 16 times faster than older equivalent calls. They support a variety of data formats including XML, SOAP, Name Value, and JSON. The Trading APIs on the other hand are more sophisticated, data rich read-write APIs that require authentication. As they describe “For example, if you are building a browser-based search widget, you will want to explore the lightweight eBay Shopping API. If you are building a listing management application, you will want to explore our secure eBay Trading API.”

One note about the very interesting PlaceOffer API that will let developers integrate bidding into their applications is how eBay is quite explicit that “Sniping (scheduled bidding) through PlaceOffer API is strictly prohibited … Applications need to be verified before PlaceOffer API access in Production environment.”

The existing eBay APIs have been popular with mashup and ecommerce developers — there are currently 77 eBay mashups in our directory. Choose from Unwired Buyer to Mashed Tickets and the Flash-based interface of Cooqy.