Stores

One of my first projects at eBay was redesigning eBay Stores. The aging product suffered from broken layouts and was never designed for mobile. I envisioned a space where brands can better tell their story by showing off their offering in a compelling way.

Feedback from Seller’s who ran stores on eBay was pretty clear. Users were unable to find their stores on mobile, read text, or experience layouts due to poor design. It's aged experience didn’t flex for modern display sizes, and utilized static widths throughout. Additionally, store owners wanted more ways to tell the story about their brand beyond a simple text field, and entice their prospective buyers with formats like video.

My task was to explore a scalable solution to these problems, and get feedback from our store owners before handing off a first version to the buyer experience team.

The Process

Most design problem’s in my experience come from a lack of POV on what is most important. To even begin to know what the hierarchy should be in a flexing design, you need to know who is using it and why. Without that data, a design will reveal your ignorance through inconsistency, confused ordering and a lack of engagement from who it’s meant for. My first task was to test the assumptions made in the old design and discover if any were valid, or if there were new ways we needed to order the content to best meet the needs for our customers.

I gathered competitor examples, and feedback from buyers on the current experience. Together, all the examples suggested that the most important part of a store page wasn’t the items in the store, but rather the identity of the brand itself. Especially in the context of eBay, buyers wanted to know who was selling the items, were they an established brand and are they trustworthy?

With this in mind, I found that the previous design for store’s was heavy on text for a description but offered little real-estate for supportive brand imagery or profile picture. These details seemed the most important since they would be the first thing a buyer would see when landing on the store page.

Additionally, there was no mechanism for knowing how many users followed the page, or if it was an official brand or “direct from” in eBay terminology. These are known key signals to our customers that help them asses if a seller is trustworthy, or worth their time.

Equipped with these insights, I explored many different iterations of structure to the page, making sure the brand presence and key indicators of trust were the highest priority in the hierarchy. Above is a sample of the many wire-frames I explored to come to a final direction.

The Result

The completed design is focused heavily on brand imagery, utilizing new icons and text emphasis to bring it across on mobile and web.

Video integration or “peaks” were also explored. To keep video as tasteful and engaging as possible, I established a rule that only one video would be rendered at a time in view, avoiding the possibility of media competing against each other for focus.

The overall response from sellers in testing was very positive, though that was to be expected with any change. The previous experience was borderline useless because of the rendering issues on mobile, a platform largely dominated by eBay traffic.

For buyers the update was more drastic. Our testers reported that they were more likely to trust stores then they did before, purely because of the layout changes. Additionally, store’s traffic substantially increased, though this too was expected. Over all, the store’s work was a much needed start to a much larger goal, and provided our buyer experience team with the foundation to continue iterating.