eBay opens up to third-party developers

The company launched its developer program in the region, announcing a competition to encourage developers in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines to develop apps on eBay and Paypal.

This announcement is also in line with Project Echo, eBay's plan to integrate third-party applications directly into the world's largest ecommerce site.

eBay announced it will pilot third-party apps for the site's Selling Manager tool and make these accessible to eBay business sellers later this year. Selling Manager has more than 700,000 subscribers, according to eBay.

By opening up its APIs (application programming interfaces), a developer, for example, can sell an application that caters to a particular group of sellers. Project Echo will be the platform for these applications.