Ubercart

I'm in the middle of developing this module for Ubercart 2.0 on Drupal 6. I do not plan on backporting to Ubercart 1.0 on Drupal 5. Currently it can create an ebay listing from an Ubercart product, but only for eBay US and only fixed price and standard auctions with free shipping. There are a lot of features that need to be added like multiple shipping options, multiple eBay accounts, payment options and the list goes on.

The more I work on this the more I realize how complex the eBay API is and how many options there are. I suspect my first release will only support a limited feature set. If you want to see the development in process you can go to http://ebay.ubercart.com. This site is under active development, so it may not work when you visit. If so, just try back later Smiling

If you are interested in this module, post here or PM me with your eBay userid, or examples of your current auctions, or a description of all the options you need. I will take this info and try to include the most needed options in the first release.

I have been struggling with how to release / support an eBay module. I see two ways to do it:

1. Free module which connects your site directly to eBay.
Advantages: It is free, enough said.
Disadvantages: eBay requires a code review for every site which connects directly via their API. For small API call volume, this is fairly easy. For medium to large volume, this takes about a month. In order to use the eBay API I have been developing under your server needs a very recent version of PHP with SSL support, curl, and a few other features which are not that common. I guess that 25% to 50% of administrators will have to make significant changes to their Apache / PHP configs in order to get it to work. From my point of view, this is a support nightmare.

2. Paid client server model where your site talks via rpc to some server (probably ebay.ubercart.com) which then talks to ebay.com.
Advantages: This avoids the delays and headaches of every admin having to sign up as an eBay developer and go through the code review process. This also solves most of the dependencies issues of a direct connection. Plus we can store future listings on the server instead of paying eBay the ~$.05 per listing for listings which start in the future.
Disadvantages: There would be a fee. If I set up a server I want to recover the cost of bandwidth, the server, maintenance, etc. . . I'm talking a reasonable monthly or per API call fee here, not a "pay for my tropical beach vacation" fee.

My goal is to provide the best solution for the average Ubercart administrator without creating a support problem for me / the Ubercart community. If I thought the average administrator could set it up and be happy with it, I would just release the direct module and be done with it. I feel the client server model would be much easier to install and use, but needs some funding.

I'm guessing that advanced admins would be better served by the direct model while non developer admins would be better served by the client server model.

I'm interested in your thoughts. Which do you think is best? What do you think would be a reasonable fee if we go that route. Do you have a better solution? The goals here are usability and minimizing the amount of support necessary.

I'm also voting for simple. A module like this (not to mention the amazon one, which might even be better) would be awesome.

I have been looking around for a while on how to integrate Ebay sales into the backoffice of Ubercart.
Most of the software found just goes half-way.
There are some exiting forums around like http://www.mistersoft.org/freelancing/Drupal/ but no final product yet.

Another interested party, any progress, updates, news, modules that we should know of?

Also very interested.

looking forward to a response here.

Thanks!

Sabzi

Does anyone know if there will be any module that integrates eBay and ubercaty?