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APIs are first-class products at eBay. They grow with the business and enable expansion to new contexts. APIs allow our developer community to create powerful experiences and manage their eBay business at scale. Our goal is a large ecosystem of developer applications that add value to our buyers and sellers.

eBay Open-Source Tools

This week, we open-sourced C# OAuth client library that will further simplify and streamline integration with eBay’s APIs. Controlling API access is crucial to the security and scale. To address data privacy, and some other security concerns, we leverage industry standard OAuth 2.0 protocol. All eBay’s APIs require clients to be authorized to allow integration with our backend systems. When using the library, a few lines of code are sufficient for the authorization. The library supports all OAuth 2.0 grant types relevant to our APIs. This is the latest addition to already open-sourced tools to simplify integration with eBay’s APIs - we previously released Java OAuth client library and Java Feed SDK.

At eBay Connect last summer, we announced that OpenAPI documents are available for all our RESTful APIs. We demonstrated that integration with read-only capabilities takes a few minutes. OAuth client libraries work very well when used alongside API clients generated from the OpenAPI documents.

One of our goals was bringing more than one billion listings together to surface the greatest selection of inventory to our partners. This includes new, everyday items as well as rare goods - if something exists in the world, it is most likely for sale on eBay. Partners use our data feeds to create a rich selection of items and provide their users with a powerful consumer-centric experience. Feed SDK abstracts downloads and large file manipulation and simplifies complex inventory curation. It enables authorized partners around the globe to programmatically access the huge selection of eBay items and curate the inventory of their choice.

Our libraries, in addition to OpenAPI documents, are convenient for third-parties to use and they are for sure a jump-start to integrating with our APIs. The SDKs are open-sourced and provide a full transparency to developers into what is happening in their integrations. Contributions from developer community are welcome.