What’s eBay Up To?

For the next few days I’ll be at eBay’s X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco, where we’ll see lots of announcements that bring together its platform.

X.commerce is meant to give retailers of all sizes better tools to conduct online and offline business. It also brings together lots of the assets acquired over the past year that together triangulate a very interesting local strategy.

Connect the dots and it has an interesting play at reaching mobile users (WHERE ads), then onboarding them into a funnel that can include product inventory (Milo), point-of-sale interaction (RedLaser) and payments (PayPal).

That’s just one piece of it. As a developer platform, X.commerce will be very deep and appeal to lots of different retailer segments and verticals. Its individual pieces will also be releasing SDKs for third parties (Milo, for example).

There are also platform partners like Adobe and Kenshoo that have already been announced, and others like Facebook that haven’t. Stay tuned for lots more coverage as these things develop.