eBay no longer charging developers fee

eBay no longer charging developers fee

online shopping and bidding giants eBay has announced that they will no longer charge a fee from developers who build sites and applications in an effort to funnel buyers and sellers its way. As a result, the membership to the eBay Developers Program is now free. In addition, they would also no longer charge for their new Web Services/unified schema API calls.

Greg Isaacs, director of the eBay Developers Program said in a statement that this initiative was to thank the developer community and invite more innovative ideas. He wrote in an announcement: “We want to thank you for your contributions to the eBay marketplace, because we know that without our developer community, eBay wouldn’t be where we are today. Second, we want to remove barriers to innovation on the platform.”

He added: “Since the first API was released in 2000, third-party developers have led the charge in developing the most cutting-edge and exciting applications and services for the eBay community.” The move is not expected to cause much damage to the revenue stream of the company as they made little money from this source.

In addition, with companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all inviting developers to contribute to their programs without paying for these similar services, eBay could no longer continue to charge for their APIs and stuff. We have seen some amazing third party applications using Google’s services like Maps. And other companies are hoping to do the same.