WHY DOES THE NEW EBAY LOOK A LOT LIKE PINTEREST? ENVY? MAYBE. BUT PHOTO-FORWARD CONTENT IS REALLY JUST A GREAT WAY FOR USERS TO WINDOW SHOP.
If your browsing habits are anything like my own, you stopped going to eBay half a decade ago. It’s not necessarily that my penchant for old stuff has diminished--in fact, I’m more interested in vintage furniture and electronics than I’ve ever been before. It’s just that. I mean. It’s eBay. It’s a relic from the Geocities era.
eBay’s new Feed turns your homepage into an endlessly tiled board of discovery (Click Image To Enlarge)
eBay VP of Design Marie Floyd Tahir tells me.
“When eBays of the world first came online, the transaction needed to work. That was the bar. It was like, oh my god, I can get this thing! I actually got my item! We’re so far from that now.”
The Internet was far from that bar, but eBay was not. The world had cell phones and social media, yet eBay had the same search-and-sort format it always had. So with that in mind, just over a year ago, Tahir and her team set out to give eBay its biggest homepage facelift since launch.
eBay provides users with overlays of hot or popular items superimposed over tiled images of other items. (Click Image To Enlarge)
The most significant change is that they’ve instituted a new feature called the Feed. Fans of Pinterest will find it familiar. You put in a few key terms--like “Rolleiflex cameras” or “Dom Perignon”--and eBay will generate a custom, interest-centric, endlessly scrolling board of images for you to explore. Adding, deleting, and customizing these items (with a dauntingly specific list of categorical parameters) is extraordinarily easy. Better still, you can preview how new search terms will look, and everything is downright instantaneous to implement.
You choose what you’d like to see with extreme specificity. No niche is too small, and then you can even refine topics within that niche (Click Image To Enlarge)
Notably, once your interests are set, this feed greets you every time from eBay.com. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a revolution, but contrast this with the eBay of yore: The site was essentially a search bar, supported by a few thumbnails of recently viewed items. It wasn’t just generally unattractive, it was unappealing, forcing the user to initiate the conversation anew each time.
Tahir explains.
“We [always] supported buying and selling in a transactional way. But the inspiration and discovery seemed like untapped potential areas. Walking down the street and seeing something in a window and have it catch your eye--that’s the real-world experience we want to, not emulate, but make better.”
Taking their feed for a spin, I immediately found eBay to be a more inviting platform. I was welcomed by a variety of things I actually like--vintage Pyrex, classic Eames furniture, and old cocktail shakers (still searching for that perfect shaker, btw, if you have any suggestions), rather than a bunch of old offers that I’d already passed on or had already expired. I was discovering more, more quickly, simply because eBay stopped hiding their best goods behind a UI curtain.
These interests form a collection that you can delete or modify with a click (Click Image To Enlarge)
Of course, while I thought that I was discovering more, more quickly, that was a bit of an illusion, or at minimum, a mental hack. Tiled images are more effective for discovery than lists because they slow your eye down, forcing it to zigzag through content, like reading a book, rather than enter an endless free-fall, like on Twitter. Part of the effectiveness of the feed is merely in that it gets me to actually look at the images eBay had all along. They really are forcing customers into a routine more akin to window shopping.
As a result, whatever you consider Ebay’s best goodies to be are no longer hidden behind a search bar (Click Image To Enlarge)
Even still, the design is only as effective as the infrastructure. Interest in Charles “Eames” flooded my feed with suggestions, not from eBay artificial intelligence or a reliable cross-referenced database but from eBay users who have spam-tagged every piece of old furniture with every midcentury modern designer in existence. So I was still left sorting through quasi-customized content, which can be a frustrating half-step away from true personalization.
And from experience, I can attest, the platform really does suck you in by forcing your eyes to zigzag around the page and take more time to explore the images than they would on a simple list (Click Image To Enlarge)
The other problem is that in photo-forward design, the design is only as beautiful as the source photography. This works on Pinterest, as people share the most beautiful studio-produced thumbnails and the service is generally beautiful as a result. But on eBay, their source photography--at least for vintage items--inevitably consists of someone using a flash in front of a dusty, wrinkled curtain. Seriously. I knew eBay photography was bad, but I had no clue just how bad until my feed so eagerly showed me.
To see more details, you simply click on the image and a low information density lightbox appears. Consider it your pricetag buffer between window shopping at the shopping counter (Click Image To Enlarge)
Tahir shares.
“It’s an issue we’ve been improving upon. In the two years since I’ve been here, we’ve rolled out policies to get rid of the graffiti--where items like camera kits are blasted with a number of different logos. We’re making strides, but it comes with time, as [user] attitudes to photography change.”
So does that make eBay’s photo focus a mistake? Is the change “too soon” for a company so steeped in Internet tradition? I don’t think so. A more visual eBay can only offer sellers more incentive to sell visually. Besides, so far, users with the Feed activated visit eBay more often, for longer and buy more items than eBay users who don’t. Assuming that Feed cohort doesn’t simply include eBay’s most active users to begin with, it seems like things are working out better already.
COMMENTARY: They say that "imitation is the biggest form of flattery," but in eBay's case, it is obvious that the auction giant does not consider Pinterest a potential threat. Pinterest could easily change its business model to challenge eBay in the online auction space, but this would be a dramatic step for the king of pinning, so the change over to a Pinterest style, is more for cosmetic reasons and it could even be a form of a pre-emptive strike. eBay's new look could be a response to rumors that it is losing some sellers to Pinterest and that its site has become boring, and this is obviously not good for business. The change to the Pinterest style is good for online window shopping, and for now, that is the principal reason for the change.
Founded in March 2010, Pinterest is still relatively young as a company and seems to be growing by the minute. During 2012, it grew from 20 employees to 100 as its user base went up from 9 million to about 40 million. This makes it the largest social media platform in users per employee.
Click Image To Enlarge
There are many interesting numbers behind this chart:
- With 400,000 users per employee, Pinterest has almost twice as many as the second largest company Facebook, with 249,000 users per employee.
- Pinterest also has the lowest number of users, 40 million.
- Facebook, with 1.06 billion users, is the largest social media platform.
- LinkedIn has as many users as Twitter, but while Twitter has about 900 employees, LinkedIn has 3500.
- Google+ is not in our chart since Google will not reveal how many of its employees that work specifically on Goggle+.
However, when compared on the basis of number of active users, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are the dominant social networks as of January 2013. Pinterest still has a long way to go before it can challenge any of the other social networks or eBay for that matter.
Click Image To Enlarge
Why is Pinterest gaining so much popularity? One main reason could be that it is an exclusive club. It’s not like other social network sites that you just join, you need to get an invitation and there’s an actual waiting list. Another reason could be that it’s full of pinboards with eye-catching pictures and also the clean design could be an add-on.
Click Image To Enlarge
eBay's Q4 2012 Earnings Call Report
On January 16, 2013, eBay reported its Q4 and full-year 2012 earnings, with revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2012, increasing 18 percent to $4 billion, compared to the same period of 2011. The company reported fourth-quarter net income on a GAAP basis of $751 million, or $0.57 per diluted share, and net income on a non-GAAP basis of $927 million, or $0.70 per diluted share. Net income was up 22 percent for the quarter.
For the full year, revenue increased 21 percent to $14.1 billion, compared to 2011 when revenues for the year were $11.6 billion. The company reported net income on a GAAP basis of $2.6 billion, or $1.99 per diluted share, and net income on a non-GAAP basis of $3.1 billion, or $2.36 per diluted share. eBay says that it enabled more than $175 billion of commerce volume (ECV) in 2012, representing growth of 18 percent. ECV is the total commerce and payment volume across all three business units consisting of Marketplaces GMV, PayPal merchant services net total payment volume, and GSI global ecommerce (GeC) merchandise sales.
PayPal’s active account growth accelerated to 15% and ended the year with approximately 123 million registered accounts. PayPal added nearly 2 million accounts a month in the fourth quarter, representing the company’s fastest active account growth rate in years.
Payment volume increased 24 percent, producing revenue growth of 24 percent, thanks to merchant and consumer adoption coupled with geographic expansion. PayPal’s mobile payment volume reached nearly $14 billion in 2012, up more than 250 percent over the prior year, as more consumers used their smartphones and tablets to pay online.
eBay CEO John Donahoe commented on its mobile revenues.
“Mobile continues to rewrite the commerce playbook, and we continue to be a mobile commerce and payments leader. eBay mobile finished the year with $13 billion in volume – more than double the prior year – and PayPal mobile handled almost $14 billion in payment volume, more than triple the prior year. In 2013, we expect each to exceed $20 billion.”
Pinterest does not report its revenues, but they are very small. It has a long way to go before it can match the firepower of an eBay.
Courtesy of an article dated March 6, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated January 16, 2013 appearing in TechCrunch
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