Merchants can now sign up for a free subscription to the new Selling Manager and give external applications that interest them a test run, since all fee-based applications have free trial periods, Dinesh Lathi, eBay vice president of Seller Experience, said in a blog .

"From sourcing product to shipping your items, Selling Manager Applications are designed to make your business easier to run," Lathi said.

has been around for years, amassing a user base of about 700,000 merchants, but it only featured applications built by eBay.

In parallel, eBay has had a program for external developers since 2000 that has been joined by about developers who have created about 13,000 applications.

Then in June of last year, eBay announced its intention to turn Selling Manager into an application repository and platform open to external developers.