eBay’s Chief Product Officer Pete Thompson said eBay is re-architecting the View Item page so that it can introduce changes more quickly. He made the remarks at a session during the eBay Open conference that kicked off (virtually) on Wednesday and runs through Friday.
Thompson said today that eBay is focused on three areas with regard to Product:
- Technology velocity;
- Organizing the breadth and depth of sellers’ inventory;
- Celebrating eBay’s wide range of sellers.
eBay is making investments all in the service of creating the best, most modern seller experience, he said. And three areas eBay is working on are efficiency, conversion, and profitability. Seller needs have evolved, and eBay must also evolve, Thompson said. eBay is working on new tools, features, and new shopping experiences.
Thompson said the View Item page is the most heavily trafficked page type. “We are re-architecting it to break it into independent modules so different teams can develop and deploy changes and new designs without dependencies to other groups, allowing for exponential improvements in speed to market.”
The next evolution of eBay Stores is focused on the following:
- Increase productivity and control
- Elevate the seller brand
- Enable meaningful buyer relationships
- Drive profitability
“This year, you will see lots of new tools and capabilities for you to better promote your business, build trust and loyalty with buyers, and build your brand,” Thompson said.
Branding has been a sticking point for sellers due to eBay’s fear of off-platform transactions, so it will be interesting to see how much trust it has to let sellers promote their business and build their brand.
You can watch his presentation from Thursday’s eBay Open conference in the following YouTube video, and check out the EcommerceBytes Blog for more information from eBay’s Vice President of Stores – including an announcement about reduced fees for sales resulting from social sharing.
So in other words, Ebay is looking to redesign the page so they can fit more advertising on it, especially more views of your competitors products at lower prices as they don’t care who makes the sale or at what price, just that a sale is made and they can report the GMS at the original asking price since those figures are not audited so they can just pull them out of the air, or pad them as needed to make Wall Street happy.
“Re-Architects” ?
What happened to “Re-Imagined” ?
Did it go on the junk term pile with “Re-Think ” ?
Ebay is a loser.
Ebay says, ““We are re-architecting it to break it into independent modules so different teams can develop and deploy changes and new designs without dependencies to other groups, allowing for exponential improvements in speed to market.””.
What this means is eBay will mess up the item view page so buyers will continue to ignore the description, Item Specifics and most of the other information, allowing them to then claim “I didn’t know” or further decry suddenly “learning” that the item they bought wasn’t what they IMAGINED because they never read the details.
We have problems with buyers who don’t read the description of our items, mostly because an 80-character title isn’t enough and nobody reads the “Item Specifics” or “Description” until AFTER they’ve made their purchase. Since many of our products are made of wood, and no two pieces of wood are alike, we explain that the actual item they get may be lighter/darker, etc. Part of this ignorance comes from using a smartphone to browse listings, rather than something with a real monitor, as eBay requires extra steps to scroll up or down to see the entire listing. And eBay’s Mobile app isn’t so good to start with.
This won’t help anything, but gives eBay’s programmers something to do – because you certainly don’t want them fixing the 3-1/2″ thick binder showing BUGS the site has accumulated since 1995, do you, eBay?
When eBay “Re-Architected” the Feedback page they “re-architected” the headings to be mismatched from the actual columns – a grade-school programming error, which would take about three minutes to fix and test. Despite pointing out the code error to “Support”, the problem, though minor, hasn’t been fixed in six months or more.
Watch for more problems with these new changes, as eBay never seems to beta-test anything, leaving that to buyers, sellers and others OUTSIDE of the company.
Good luck!
Looking up re-architect in the dictionary
“fix it till it breaks”