Preston Smalley

I was discussing eBay search with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a while and he brought up that he was impressed with a number of the changes we’d made over the past year. Flattered, I probed a bit further to find that it was how eBay handled bad queries that he found most helpful. This is now the third separate person that has mentioned this particular improvement to me.

Here’s how the feature works (launched in June 2005). When a buyer searches for something that returns low or no results we offer suggestions on how to improve the query. For example if a buyer searches for more than 4 keywords we suggest crossing out some of the more problematic ones along with the number of items they’d find with that query (patent pending). Here is an example of a Finding Nemo query:

 

In this way we enable buyers that would have perhaps left eBay to continue their shopping experience. In a similar way if a buyer pics too many options in a product finder on the left-nav we suggest removing some of the attributes. This is critical when a shopper goes into Tax-mode and fills out all the attributes as important to them–not realizing that the product they are describing actually does not exist. Here is an example of a Sony Laptop query: 

Please let me know what improvements you find helpful or areas that still need improvement so I can add it to my long list.

This morning I’m preparing for my marketing class on Saturday and decided I’d look into eBay’s new Marketplace president, John Donahoe’s background. So I started with Bain & Company where he was their Worldwide Managing Director. Here are some articles that jumped out at me…

• The decision driven organization (Paul Rogers, Bain & Company)
  Several points jumped out at me. The need for clear decision makers, well defined roles, aligned goals and structure. This gives me some insight as to what John Donahoe has in mind for eBay. This diagram shows the 5 steps needed:
  

• The Last Legacy of the Dotcom Era (John Donahoe et al, Bain & Company)
  Discusses how to properly fund ventures within the corporation. How to decide what adjacent markets and opportunities into which you should move.

• Putting your leaders where it counts (Bain & Company)
  This is an exciting way to reward and leverage your organization’s leaders. It discusses how executives want to develop their leaders and yet they don’t spend enough time. Bain argues that putting your leaders to good use and developing them is a critical task.

In summary Bain & Company looks like an exciting and interesting place to work.

I’m working on listing my father-in-laws BMW on eBay which got me to thinking about the eBay Motors + Google Maps mashup that Adam Trachtenberg and Luke Wroblewski put together for Web 2.0.

It will be interesting to watch how intellectual property law will evolve to handle these mashups. Will NavTec reconsider it’s agreement with Google? Will more companies like eBay open up their infrastructure and APIs for this usage?

Also here’s another recent mashup, Frapper, which allows you to plot any number of addresses onto a map yourself.

I helped drive forward a program of user experience changes to our search products during 2005. The first of which launched in May 2005 as the alpha test for a “New way to Shop on eBay”. In addition to general simplification of the Finding UI, it introduced the following improvements:

• Multi-faceted browsing (e.g. search by bed size OR brand OR product type)
• Matching buyer and seller language (e.g. CK = Calvin Klein)
• Multiple selection of concepts (e.g. see all the size 8.0 & 8.5 shoes)

Alpha Test (May – June 2005)

A limited test was run in five categories in May thru June of 2005 to a small percentage of users. Shown below is a screenshot from our bedding category. Press Release

New Way to Shop on eBay (May 2005)

Update:

• Finding experience launched within eBay Express (April 2006)