10 Years
October 7th, 201810 years ago today we launched our first app, Quantity Manager. It started as a simple idea to take advantage of the changing eBay platform which had begun forcing sellers to consolidate their listings into single multi-quantity listings. At the time multi-quantity listings could only show their full quantity which was later replaced with the option to show “More than 10 available”. This change negatively impacted sellers by removing the urgency from buyers to make a purchase. Quantity Manager solves that problem by hiding this count from eBay so buyers only see an artificially low quantity. Quantity Manager was launched within weeks of eBay allowing quantity changes to existing listings and was the first app of its kind. Quantity Manager rose in popularity a year later in 2009 when it became one of 17 launch partners with eBay’s App Center. It was further recognized by eBay in 2010 when it was given eBay’s Star Developer Award.
A recent study conducted by eBay showed when considering free shipping, item price, item location, seller feedback, and scarcity that scarcity was the biggest factor in determining whether a buyer would complete their purchase after visiting an item. Free shipping was the second biggest factor. Over 60% of all listings in the study that had sales had a quantity of only 1 or 2.
In those 10 years we have onboarded nearly 15000 eBay sellers and automatically refreshed quantities of our sellers’ listings after a sale over 54 million times. The vast majority of quantity refreshes have occurred within 10 seconds of each sale with some as quickly as 4 seconds. We are currently monitoring almost 2M listings and almost 11M when considering variations separately. And this has been accomplished with an uptime of 99.93% since 2011 which is about 7x better than eBay.
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