EBay To Overhaul Design To Aid How Shoppers Find and Buy Products

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EBay To Overhaul Design To Aid How Shoppers Find and Buy Products [online.wsj.com]

As eBay Inc. prepares for a critical holiday shopping season, the company this week plans to unveil new elements of an overhaul in how shoppers find and buy products on its Web site.

Behind the new look, which includes eBay's first major home-page redesign in nearly four years, is an urgent effort to close a technology gap that has caused the onetime Web pioneer to lag behind rivals like Amazon.com Inc. Amazon for years has had many of the same features that eBay is adding.

"One of the most important things we had to do was become more of a technology-driven company," says eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe. He says that while the company has made "significant progress" in its turnaround, eBay is only about halfway through some major technological goals, such as building a product catalog for the millions of products sold on eBay.

[fabulousyarn]

DUH. Worst interface in the world - if meg whitman wins in california you'll never be able to find the right exit on the freeway.

[herb]

DUH. Worst interface in the world - if meg whitman wins in california you'll never be able to find the right exit on the freeway.

Yeah, just think market cap might be 38.5B instead of the current 38.4B, if they had changed the interface so that the final 1 percent were happy with it;

[aleksl]

nevermind

[jwolthuis]

Ok, I am opening View Source...

Standard markup for Facebook integration.

@aleksl: You aren't relevant today unless you allow customers to "like you" and post their purchases on their wall.
</sarcasm>

[gpilling]

So this will make yet ANOTHER change to ebay. Great. Just f-ing great. Is that 5 this year?

At least we can have confidence that it won't work right, just like the Compatibility that they have just added in Motors.

[lexipixel]

Talk about stupid.

1). The new interface is slower, (thumbnail images slowly fill in once you scroll down the page -- you can actually watch the images paint onto the screen 'cause it's so slow).

2). They made the fonts smaller on most of the nagivation -- that should help all the grandparents shopping for Christmas gifts.

3). They junked up the screen with "holiday" gift icons, reminders, etc.. enough to bug anyone who ISN'T Christmas shopping.

4). they have changed the search refinements in many categories -- so long time users now have to stumble around trying to get the site to produce the results they want.

5). Changing ANYTHING in the 60 days before Christmas --- that's a good way to alienate your established customer base.


With that said, if you are selling online, and want to confuse and alienate your customers, decrease sales during the busiest selling season of the year, and generally give your visitors the feeling that you could care less about their online experience -- follow eBay's lead.

[gpilling]

Thats not even the best part - they now are actively removing duplicate listings. So they have now pulled several hundred of mine and they think that a part that fits a Ford truck is the same part that fits a Chevy. Idiots.

[Essex_boy]

Its hard to tell which direction Ebay are heading, wouldnt surprise me if in the future you hear something along the lines of 'Ebay stagnating - Buyers and sellers leaving in droves'