InformationWeek: New Face Of E-Commerce

InformationWeek spells out the benefits to ecommerce sites for opening up their databases and platforms to third party developers. This data point alone is worth pondering: "[a]bout 40 percent of the items listed for sale on eBay's U.S. site come in through its API," though much of that is probably the result of auction sniping (the practice of bidding during the last few seconds of an auction through timing software).

Examples include small innovative players such as the Hive Group (with their Amazon Honeycomb) and avatar provider Oddcast (which we mentioned last year and whose eBay Sitepal plugin has been introduced two months ago - if you see it in production on eBay please send us a link to the auction); as well as big shots such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and SAP. The ubiquitous Microsoft is in part of the action too, its Office suite being able to interact with these web services and APIs (to allow for instance eBay sellers to track their auctions with Excel). Remember all the talk about B2B marketplaces from four years ago but didn't seem to go anywhere despite the overwhelming buzz? You could say this is one way they're actually happening.