Thank you all for this wonderful journey

Thanks to you and the 500 community developers and MercadoLibre’s sellers who participated in our Developers Conference 2nd edition, the event that brought together the IT world and eCommerce business in one place.

Teams from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay came, which make us really happy, because that means that it doesn’t matter where were they from, they grabbed their stuff and made a big trip to be at the DevConf. That’s a community!

New starting point. New challenges.

During the event opening, Marcos Galperín, MercadoLibre’s founder and CEO, said: “It’s a pleasure for us to be here today. We want to tell you we are still 100% focused on creating a big team of developers to continue opening and improving this ecosystem. There are a lot of opportunities. I invite you to be creative and think about our API’s considering these 5 fundamental keys: to further improve our payment, billing, and shipping systems, to bring mobile solutions that grow week to week across the region, and being able to offer more and better services to our sellers and buyers.”

We proposed to ourselves that we create a meeting point, a point of exchange, to share company news and learn together the best way to use the tools we have made available. That’s why we teamed up with Wayra, Endeavor, NXTP.Labs, CESSI (House of Software Enterprises and IT Services) and CACE (Argentinian House of eCommerce), the most experienced organizations in promoting and hosting IT enterprises.

That’s how we thought about different content for this year. On one side, our big sellers had the opportunity to see possible solutions to improve their business, while our developers participated in our technical presentations and API demonstrations. Together, we were able to discover all the options we have to create the most innovative applications to integrate in the ecosystem: MercadoLibre, MercadoPago, MercadoLibre Ads and MercadoShops.

The challenge was set and clear when Daniel Rabinovich, MercadoLibre’s CTO, announced that the full catalog of online apps is being published online so people can vote for them and begin the Developer’s Certification on the community site. This developer’s certificate program is for those developers who are already working with our API and that went through a series of evaluations that the company demands to certify them. Additionally, , we launched the Mobile Challenge, a competition that invites developers to present a project on the Mobile API. The conditions are going to be available on our website next week. The winning project is going to be awarded with ARS$50.000. “The prize for the most innovative apps chosen by the community is just the first step. There will be more. It’s an incentive so we go out to meet the sellers, understand what they need, and solve the problems in the most creative way possible. The goal at the end of the day should be that all of us grow, that the developers’ community and the sellers improve MercadoLibre’s ecosystem.”

Dario Simonassi shared some important concepts about the API’s and immediately after Federico Procaccini, MercadoLibre’s General Manager, showed different possible business models where the API can fit. He made a tour starting from when the seller lists their product, going through the price management, how to answer our buyers’ questions, stock management, payment system, shipping, and finally, the moment when the product is delivered to the buyer’s door. An innovative development can solve and improve how things are managed in all of these instances.

“There are millions of things to do. Management systems to get smart at handling costs, or billing systems that generate electronic bills automatically for the sales, calculating the amount of taxes the seller should pay for the transactions made over the month. In each one of these stages we can develop something. Getting integrators, developers, and sellers together. That’s the philosophy. ”, Federico explained.

Later, Pablo Moretti, from MercadoLibre’s team, showed us live using big screens how you register and configure an App in the platform. We got into the code, copy & paste, and we were ready to work. Easy. Very easy. From that moment on it’s on us to create something productive.

Experiences that serve as a compass.

Sellers contributed with a special point of view. Because when you get to see the look on the face of those who offer you the products and services and the obstacles they have to solve to make the work more efficient, you come up with stuff. We knew the case of some Pymes, big and medium, that managed to overcome specific obstacles thanks to the projects some integrators created.

We have to understand that a lot of PyMes don’t have IT specialists and they don’t know about API’s potential. That for us should be a big sign with the word OPPORTUNITY!!! written on it.

An example is Data Computación, which has more than 140,000 successful sales. They started in 2006 and they got the Best MercadoLibre’s Seller Award in 2011. But when they had to deal with the trouble of importing the products they used to sell, they were obligated to expand. The reality was that there were structural matters, costs, physical space, and even the quantity of employees that limited them. What did they do? The started to manage their products with an integral solution of management in the cloud, and they used the solution from one of the pioneers on the use of the APIs: Virtualseller. The result was that in only one year, they grew more that they thought they would because they were able to integrate all of their management systems in the MercadoLibre’s cloud. Today they’re Top Sellers and 99% of their clients recommend them.

Another case is Nexus, who has 62,000 positive feedback. They had all the data of the company on excel and everything was documented, but every time they changed something, they had to change every item that was listed online, according to product type, price, specifications, etc. That’s when they noticed they needed to improve the efficiency of their management system so that when they changed anything, no matter how little it was, it would be updated automatically in the platform. They searched for the way to integrate their business into MercadoLibre and the results exceeded the expectations. They solved the stock control problem – when they run out of some product the system sends an alert warning that they must buy some more – and they are able to answer all the buyers’ questions in record time and in less than 24 hours. Additionally, now they can measure the business in real time.

These kinds of solutions using the API is what thousands of sellers need and developers can offer.

We invite you to join us in making news.

We’ll keep working and hope to see you again very soon.

Slides & videos

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