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Adam
Magento, eBay and X Commerce
August 22, 2011 AdamEarlier in 2011, a new open platform business was launched, called X. Commerce. This was the result of eBay and PayPal merging their API with the aim of creating an ecommerce solution that would offer developers what it termed a ‘complete approach’ to online and offline business. This launch was made easier by the fact that eBay owns PayPal and, since the launch took place, eBay has also acquired e-commerce giant GSI Commerce and Magento, which is a popular e-commerce storefront.
Taken together, these e-commerce solutions – Magento, GSI, PayPal and eBay – form the pillars of the new X. Commerce. eBay intends to reveal this new platform properly in October 2011, at its Innovate 2011 conference. This means that there are now hundreds of thousands of developers at the disposal of this new platform, as PayPal and eBay together have around 200000, and the acquisition of Magento earlier this year has added another 450000.
One of the aims of this new software platform is to create what has been called a more robust ‘fabric’ that will vastly improve the online ecommerce experience of both retailers and online customers. eBay intends to announce a range of new partners that will also help to build up this fabric, making it as comprehensive as possible. A few of the partners have already become known, and X Commerce developers will be able to access analytics from the platform offered by Adobe’s Omniture.
Also, eBay has recently announced a new partnership with Kenshoo. This is a digital marketing software company that is backed by Sequoia. Kenshoo aims to help its developers to promote their online storefront through mobiles, online and in store by making use of their online marketing software platform. For instance, they can help companies with their SEO, create leads that could benefit businesses and also extract inventories of merchants. They already help a number of large retailers, including Amazon, Sears, Target and more.
It is said that this is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when it comes to the partnerships that will make up the new X Commerce platform and that there are still many more to be announced at eBay’s conference in October. All of this links to eBay’s plans to dominate both mobile and local commerce; they want to engage developers on its marketplace and the acquisition of Magento ecommerce and PayPal play a key part in this strategy.
For instance, PayPal has been able to help create a following of developers and now the goal for eBay is to start connecting all of these recent acquisitions and developments by joining them all together on an open platform. This is what the new X Commerce seems to be doing; bringing together a large amount of eBay’s assets and allowing them to create a new, powerful open ecommerce solution that covers everything including storefronts, payments and marketing.
It will be interesting to see what happens with this over the coming months and the eBay conference in October 2011 certainly sounds as though it is one to watch.
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