Time was where eBay was one of the biggest marketplaces online. Now with emerging changes in how people look for and buy items online, eBay is fighting to maintain their share of the internet pie.
A more personal and simpler buying experience
This is what Businessweek's article "Ebay's Bid to Win Back Buyers" has to say about the recent changes:
Now eBay is making the biggest effort in its 12-year history to recapture the magic - and bring back the buyers. The company is completely revamping its flagship site, making it easier for shoppers to find and purchase items and discover goods they never knew they had to have. "We are more focused on buyers than we have ever been before," says John Donahoe, president of eBay's Marketplaces, the division that oversees eBay's core shopping business.
Terri Wells gives an in-depth review of some of the changes on eBay in his post for Search Engine News - "Ebay Overhauls Site". Are the changes truly improving the buying experience? Here are some examples of what modifications were made:
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.
As more bloggers are weighing on the "new and improved" eBay, Lissa McGrath ponders the question "Is bidding from Ebay's auction page now history?" in her post on "Ebay's new Bid History page."
I have always been a faithful user of the Auction page for bidding, but I decided I would give using the Bid History page a shot. I used the refresh button (that appears when there are only 15 minutes remaining on the auction, same as on the Auction page) to keep an eye on the time remaining, and placed and confirmed my bid from the Bid History page. It was actually a lot of fun. I didn't feel distracted by other things going on (mainly because this page is very minimalistic and has no ads or fluff to it).
With 241 million registered users worldwide and 153 million PayPal accounts, eBay is far from rolling over and dieing anytime soon. But in this fast paced technological age, every online company is just a step or two away from being ousted by the next newest thing- as seen in Google's meteoric rise. Ebay's changes attest to their realizing that at the end of the day, customers are finicky, and the best way to retain both online shoppers and online sellers is constant improvement and change.
