When you’re the biggest online auction house around and you’re starting to feel the competition breathing down your neck, what do you do? If you’re eBay, you borrow a bunch of ideas from your competition and try to make them your own. In this second article of a two-part series looking at eBay’s changes, we’ll see what else the site has done for its customers, both buyers and sellers.
Last time we talked about what eBay did to make searching for something to bid on more like window shopping. We mentioned the “wall of images” approach, and how hovering over a single image brought up more detailed information about the item. We talked about eBay’s new Bid Assistant, designed to help buyers win the items they want more often without having to closely monitor the site. We even mentioned the new one-click bidding approach, to help cut down on nail biting when an auction is in its final 15 minutes.
Greg Sandoval of CNet found some other searches and search results that showed eBay is still in the process of experimenting. Sandoval tried putting in the search term “Nikon D40” and saw a page different from the “wall of images” I’d seen for my searches. Instead, he saw a page with two photos of different models of the camera. “The pictures were much larger than the thumbnails typically found in eBay’s results,” Sandoval noted. “Below the photos were ratings of the cameras, links to customer reviews, and the range of prices.”
Further changes are on the way. Sandoval said that eBay may soon begin offering views of the same item from different angles. But coming back to what Sandoval saw, further down this camera page were “tabs labeled Overview, Listings, Reviews…followed by technical and product details and descriptions as well as a listing of products that other customers have bought after purchasing the camera.”
Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, seemed pleased with the changes. His company sells ecommerce software tools to small- and medium-sized businesses. Of the example Sandoval gives, he says that “These features have existed on the site, but never in an aggregated or simple way to find. This is a much more Amazon way of buying.”
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