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I am Evan Thomas, Sr Product Manager at eBay talking about ebay’s personalization strategy: a balance of human curation, and machine algorithm. Ask me anything!
by inIAmATakeaways:
* eBay is attempting to catalog everything and move away from the way listings are shown now.
* New changes to search “won’t happen without error, and not going to happen overnight.”
* Algorithms will go into place that select what items users see. This is not based on their interests. “We have algorithms that do a great job at finding one-of-a-kind items from some guys basement, and surface them to customers that we know have a high tolerance for seeing them” -
I know some sellers have been freaked out by the catalogue idea because then its the Amazon game of competing on price for the by box.
But could they do this for all the weird vintage stuff many of us sell?
What happens if an item doesnt have a bar code or label?I feel he’s talking more about all the new stuff people sell on eBay, which I believe I’ve read is 80% of sales. Makes sense not to have 500 listings for the same exact new item being sourced from the same Chinese factory.
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To be honest, I’m fine if they have a way to catalog things intelligently. I’m primarily dealing with electronics where I stand to benefit from a catalog that’s organized based on quality of picture/price/etc rather than the existing system that often places me in the mid-range of listings despite being priced better than the top few listed.
You’re right that these individual, highly-unique items will need a different solution. Cataloging them is not the answer.
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Obviously we dont know their implementation, but this sounds reasonable:
We’re thinking of “cataloguing everything” a bit differently than competitors. For us, we understand the uniqueness of our inventory (or, the world’s inventory!). Let me give an example. Let’s say there’s a basketball signed by LeBron James on eBay. On Amazon, they would consider that a normal, spalding basketball that was the same as every other orange basketball. For us, we know the value of that basketball is its uniqueness, because King James signed it. We would classify it differently.
There’s nothing that says by cataloguing, every item must be conjoined with another. There is a vast amount of our catalogue (everything from antiques, to board game replacement parts, to cheetos shaped like gorillas) that has no duplicate. By cataloging those unique things, we are essentially removing noise from around them, so that they can shine brighter amongst the rest of the items in a search result or browse page.
On a search results page, we know that images with white backgrounds and high quality images get more clicks. Once the customer clicks to the concept “Greatest Easton Press edition of Moby Dick”, then that customer is given what we call the spectrum of value of that concept. They will see your offer, next to many other offers. They will still see your image and description and the things you have done to give you an competitive advantage, relative to the grainy far-away picture. It’s simply a means of organizing and bucketing our inventory based on shopping intent.
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Just got through reading the article and especially all the comments and answers. Very interesting approach.
Also makes me think that the knowledge of and use of SEO and use of key words will be less relevant. Joe Mezz above is asking for some help on keywords. Well there are some key word app’s out there will provide key words as well as google Analytics, and will also show you the key words being used most often, but difference will that matter if the new Ebay approach will be to analyze a person previous search behavior, and follow their histories and then present them with selections they think they may like or what Ebay interprets as “the buyers intent” as opposed to a direct bounce back of the exact key words in order of Google strength? i don’t know how it is all going to shake out.
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I’m not too familiar with reddit, the link just takes me to a picture of the guy holding a sign. How do I access the actual content?
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Just had time for a quick skim. Kind of disappointed to see most of the questions had nothing to do with the product catalog/personalization strategy. I know it’s “ask me anything” but I was hoping people would see it as an opportunity to learn more about that stuff, rather than ask a lot of more general ebay questions.
Still, it was interesting, thanks for posting this!
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