eBay Overhauls Site, Search - Focus on the Shoppers

eBay understands that the buyers and sellers both need to be there for the company to make money. If the buyers are not having a good experience, they’ll go elsewhere, and the sellers will follow. And these days, buyers don’t want to take a lot of time to do things. “Most consumers are just getting less patient to wait for things,” observed Jamie Iannone, vice president of eBay’s Marketplace Buyer Experience team. “We are trying to make it simpler, more personalized and more relevant.”

One example of this is the new Bid Assistant. If you buy items such as CDs, DVDs, books or other things that are not truly one of a kind, you might find this useful. The Bid Assistant lets the user group several desired items together and choose the highest amount that he or she wants to bid. The Bid Assistant then does the bidding automatically, and stops when it has won one of them for the user. As a quick note, Bid Assistant is only available to people with feedback of 5 or higher, so you need to actually have used eBay and received some positive feedback either as a buyer or a seller (or both).

Another example lets users bid with just one click in the final 15 minutes of an auction. You won’t have to constantly refresh the page in your browser to see whether you are still the high bidder. Instead, the page will display a smaller “layer” that will tell you how much time before the auction ends, what the current high bid is, and whether you are still the high bidder. Users will only need to refresh that small layer rather than the whole page. Refreshing that one section should happen much more quickly.

But there’s more going on with the changes to eBay than can easily be covered in one article. In the next article I’ll cover the changes eBay has devised to make life easier for the sellers, and talk about the social networking features it is adding. I also hope to cover how eBay is starting to look more like its competition.