eBay Opens Social Networks - eBay, We Hardly Knew You

In short, eBay’s recent overhaul is a huge change from the days when hard-to-see thumbnails nestled to the left of brief text descriptions that linked to much longer text descriptions. Sellers no longer need to put misspellings into their descriptions (making them more verbose) to ensure that buyers will find the items; they can tag items behind the scenes when they put in the description, and eBay’s search engine is now set up to spot more common misspellings and figure out what the buyer means. Common abbreviations such as “sz” for “size” supposedly don’t confuse it anymore.

Will these changes give eBay the boost it needs? Certainly, the early feedback has been positive, if a little impatient. “We would have liked to see this focus on the core marketplace for the last three or four years,” said Wingo. If these changes are to stick, though, they’ll have to run deeper than the merely cosmetic; eBay may have to reorient its organizational structure. An article in Business Week noted that the company used to be divided by specialty, separating engineers and marketers who worked on the same project; now everyone working on a particular project is grouped together, allowing for a faster and more natural flow of communication between people on the same team.

Challenges remain, of course, and one of them was bred from eBay’s earlier success. The auction site attracts both the casual and the serious when it comes to buying and selling, and any change that pleases one group is likely to upset another. For example, eBay Express lets users load several fixed-price items into one shopping cart and check all of them out at once. It’s great for shoppers, but really finicky sellers may begrudge how easy it makes it for users to shop with several sellers at once.

So what’s the take-home message here? Site owners need to be very aware of how visitors are using their web site, and design around this user experience. If you own a well-established web site, acknowledge the possibility that your customers may be changing their habits. Realize that they have experiences outside your web site, and that they can always go somewhere else.

It’s likely that the growth of a more visual, image-oriented web with social sites helped inspire eBay’s changes. If your users want a more visually-oriented experience on your site -- and let’s face it, some things are easier to find when you can SEE them -- find a way to give it to them without sacrificing too much in the way of how quickly your site loads (there are technologies that can help with that).

Oh, and one more thing: remember that competition isn’t always direct. Amazon didn’t start by offering auctions on its site, but now it is serious competition for eBay. So keep your eye on what your competition is doing -- even if it isn’t your most obvious competition.