UsableMarkets

If there is any doubt that improving the user experience of a online market is the right (and profitable) strategic move, then listening to eBay’s Meg Whitman during yesterday’s Q2 2007 Earrnings Call should dispell those doubts.

I don’t usually have quotes this long, but these are worth it:

Meg Whitman
During the last three years, the pace of change on the Internet accelerated. Competition increased, customer expectations changed and technology evolved. We recognized these changes were happening and took some actions to respond. We made a decision that, as the leader in e-commerce, our mission was to ensure that buyers and sellers all over the world could have the type of online commerce experience they wanted, no matter where they lived or what kind of format they wanted to buy or sell in.

So we bought Shopping.com here in the U.S. and extended the footprint of that business abroad. We built and bought a global portfolio of classified sites and more recently, began to transform the user experience on eBay much more rapidly than we had in the past.

and this, from the Q&A …

Aaron Kessler – Piper Jaffray
Can you talk about your priorities in terms of the improved user experience on eBay in the second half in terms of either fraud or improved user experience? Maybe if you can detail a few of those.

Meg Whitman
Sure, let me take that. As you have correctly pointed out, making improvements to the user experience is one of our main strategic priorities. Let me tell you about a few of them.

First is to improve the finding experience, what we call finding 2.0. You can see that we have actually done some work in something we call DefMatch, which is in fact a relevant and algorithmic search engine that actually, based on your prior searches on eBay and what we know about other people who search for those same items, we think we can get you to the items that you’re looking for faster and better.

You might recall in the old age of eBay, you’d do a search for Madonna and you’d get 20,000 items, everything from T-shirts to books. Now we’re able to get you there much faster. So the first bucket would be finding.

The second would be making the auction experience even more fun. The first is something we call Bid Assistance, which is really great. We heard from a lot of buyers that they were scared to bid on more than one item because God forbid you won five iPods instead of the one that you really wanted. So we have created something called Bid Assistance that allows you to bid on multiple items. We manage that bidding for you, and you will not win more than one item. That actually has come across with great results.

We have something called eBay Countdown, which actually visualizes the fun of the end of the auction with avatars and showing the race towards the end. We’ve got Feedback 2.0, which is launched and expanded now in virtually every country. We’ve got a new homepage layout coming. We have also increased customer support for both buyers and sellers. Also, by the end of the year, we will have a 360-degree view of the customer, so that if you are a PayPal customer and you have issues around your eBay account, we can help you on that same phone call or same chat as opposed to having to transfer you between centers.

Those are probably the highlights. I would direct you to something called www.playground.ebay.com, where we have a really fun site for users to test a number of the new products that we’re launching and provide feedback. I think you’ll find it to be exciting, and our users are actually giving us great feedback on it.

As always, thanks for listening.
~alex