Jul/090
1. Ebay API: Before you begin
Successes and disappointments with ebay development
Creating an application that operates directly with ebay data may seem like a promising idea, but there are some problems you may encounter after having invested a lot of time in it.
Here are the two problems I have encountered.
The continuous change of API without supporting of previous versions
If you are writing an application with ebay API, you can only be sure that it will keep working for 18 months. There is no guarantee that your application will keep working after that .
More on versioning
Here you can follow the API versions and the changes made:
The last message I have received in the eBay Developers Newsletter says that in 1 year the Shopping API will be replaced with the new Finding API.
Participation in ebay partner network
If you are planning to make money with your ebay application through the ebay partner network or some ebay affiliates, this may not work because of ebay’s not accepting your site. This happened to me. I saw some sites whose only content consisted of searching for ebay articles and linking to them. Even though the services they provided were this primitive, these sites were ebay partners.
I made an application that did something more: it implemented the ebay searching interface in Russian – a language which is not supported by ebay currently nor will be for a long time.
My app made ebay available to Russian users – they came to my Russian site via Russian search engines, received information about ebay listings and could then follow a link to the ebay site.
Yet neither the ebay partner network nor ebay at affili.net accepted my site for partnership.
Register and go
I assume the registration at developer.ebay.com presents no problems. At the time when I registered, it was barely possible to register or use the site in Firefox, but this seems to be over.
You need the sandbox keys for requests which cause changes in ebay data: adding items, updating etc. For browsing you can use the production keys.
You need a user token to perform calls as a logged-in user. The operations you can normally perform without being logged into your ebay account, such as browsing and searching, do not require a user token.
There are some ebay classes and frameworks for PHP. I have tried these and decided to write my own class instead, one that would 1. work properly and 2. work the way I want it to.
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