eBay recently announced the release of two brand new buy and sell API’s. These APIs are aimed at fostering better integration of eBay products within third party applications. eBay posted several articles on their blog on October 19th detailing not only the highlights of what these new buy and sell APIs offer but also a full summary of their API journey as a company from SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to REST (REpresentational State Transfer) and all the hurdles in between.
eBay introduces two buy APIs in this release, Browse and Order. The Browse API allows you to retrieve specific items from eBay’s goods collection or provide search filters to retrieve a list of matching items from the collection. On the sell side, eBay has released six new APIs, Account, Inventory, Fulfillment, Marketing, Analytics, and Metadata. The Metadata API offers a singular get method to retrieve sales tax information, which seems out of place given that there is an entire sales tax resource in the Account API with many contextual methods. The Analytics API allows you to retrieve some basic metrics on eBay user profiles, such as a user’s marketplace region and page traffic numbers, but does not support any exciting predictive analytics or data modeling.
