I have one word for eBay: oAuth

The eBay feed is up. Currently, it supports notifications for BidReceived (seller), FeedbackReceived (buyers and sellers), ItemLost (buyer), ItemMarkedPaid (buyer), ItemMarkedShipped (buyer), ItemSold (sellers), ItemWon (buyers), ItemUnsold (seller), OutBid (buyers) and WatchedItemEndingSoon (buyer).

I may add support for dispute notifications later if people want it.

This has been by far the most convoluted, unnecessarily complex API I have worked with. Sooner or later these large sites will realise that 8 trillion pages of incoherent spaghetti documentation is not valuable to developers. Just give us a few, short, cohesive pages covering the major use cases and a wiki.

They should also give serious consideration to oAuth. Currently their procedure is as follows:

• Client obtains a session ID
• Client redirects to the eBay consent page
• Client retrieves the token using the session ID
• Client sets notification preferences using the token
• Client obtains a client alerts API token
• Client signs into the client alerts API and retrieves session values
• Client calls the API notification method using the session values

This is just absurd. Why not just use oAuth? It'ss simple, secure and widely supported.

eBay is another of those services that I don't use much, so please report any bugs. So far I've just been bidding small amounts on cheap items I don't want. I almost became the proud owner of a USB keyring shaped like a Nike sneaker.