eBay Town Hall
May 31, 2007
3:00 – 4:30 PM
General Topics
WELCOME TO THE EBAY TOWNHALL WHERE THE COMMUNITY SPEAKS WITH YOUR HOST, BILL COBB, PRESIDENT OF EBAY NORTH AMERICA. FOR YOUR QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS, CALL 877-474-3302, OR INTERNATIONALLY, AT 858-678-8958. AND NOW, OUR MODERATOR, GRIFF:
Griff: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Town Hall.I’m Griff, Dean of eBay Education, host of eBay Radio, author of the official eBay Bible, long time eBay buyer and seller, and of course, emcee for this Town Hall. I’m joined by our host, Bill Cobb. As you may know, he’s the President of eBay North America Marketplaces. Welcome Bill.
Bill Cobb: Hello Griff.
Griff: It’s good to be back serving as the emcee of Town Hall. You know, I took some time off last month before gearing up for this busy summer schedule. That of course, includes the fast approaching eBay Live! conference in Boston. It’s only two weeks away and I don’t know about you Bill, but I’m really excited.
Bill Cobb: Hm, hm.
Griff: We’re broadcasting live to you via Internet radio from our Headquarters, here in San Jose, California. We want to thank our friends at WS Radio for their help in making this broadcast possible.
We’re here to take your eBay related questions today live, on the air, when you give us a call. So pick up the phone and call us now. It’s a great way to talk to us directly and get answers to your questions from eBay Marketplace leaders. We value this time because well, we get to hear what’s on your minds.
Now today’s Town Hall is scheduled for 90 minutes in length to give us lots of time to address questions. And we’d really love to hear from you, so don’t be shy. In fact, the one thing I can say about our great Community is they’re not shy.
Call and ask Bill or any of our other panel members your question here on the air. Just dial our toll free number, 877-474-3302, and if you start calling now, we’ll get you in the queue and we’ll get to those questions in just a bit. You can also send us your questions by email to . Our primary goal is to take questions live over the telephone but we’ll use this email address as a supplemental way to gather questions. And we’ll also answer some of the common questions we’ve received via email in the last few days.
Okay, enough of that, let’s get onto the introductions for today’s Town Hall. The host for today’s Town Hall of course, is Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America. Hello Bill.
Bill Cobb: I already said hello.
Griff: Say it again.
Bill Cobb: Hello Griff, how are you? Great to see you.
Griff: Great to see you as well. Today we’d like to focus a bit on finding items on eBay. So Bill has asked some members of eBay’s Finding Team to join the panel. Let me introduce first, Jeff King, Senior Director of the Finding Experience.
Jeff King: Hello, Griff. Hello, Bill. Thanks for having me.
Griff: Jeff and his team are focused on developing New Finding technology, which is so important to our buyers and sellers. And also from Jeff’s team with us today, is Josh Loftus Josh has led much of the design efforts for the new Finding technology. Hi, Josh.
Josh Loftus: Hi, guys. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Griff: Now this is Josh’s first time at Town Hall, so we’ve got to be good to Josh, because I think he’s a little nervous. Please be kind.
Josh Loftus: Okay.
Griff: We’ll get back to Jeff and Josh in a moment, but let me finish introducing the rest of our panel. Next is a familiar face, or should I say a familiar voice since you’re listening and not watching. But who knows eBay TV in the future? You never know. Matt Halprin, our regular Town Hall T&S, that’s Trust & Safety guru is with us today. Hi, Matt.
Matt Halprin: Hey, Griff. Hey everybody in the Community.
Griff: And also rejoining us, Jim Ambach, from eBay Seller Experience Team. Jim’s a regular panelist so you know him pretty well and for those of you who write in with your questions about specifically, seller features or tools, you often times will get an answer back from Jim, so we’re happy to have Jim back with us today. Hello, Jim.
Jim Ambach: Hi, Griff. How are you? It’s good to be here.
Griff: Now uh, where is he? He’s not, oh, there he is. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you. I just want to make sure you’re here. I’m looking on the panel and I don’t see our next guest but he’s right here in front of us, Colin Rule, from PayPal. Now Colin’s here to answer any questions that might come in about PayPal. Welcome, Colin. Say it real loud.
Colin Rule: Hi, Griff. Hi, everybody. Glad to be here.
Griff: So Colin’s not on a mike but he’ll jump on one if you have a question. And finally, I want to introduce a new face to North America but not to the eBay family. Philipp Justus joins us after running eBay in Europe for a number of years. We’re excited to have him join us in North America to head up the auctions business. You may have read Philipp’s recent announcement about eBay To Go and a great new tool for buyers, called “Bidding Assistant”. Hello and welcome Philipp.
Philipp Justus: Thanks, Griff, and hi to everybody out there.
Griff: Thanks for joining us on this Town Hall today. And finally of course, we welcome all of you listening today. Now we’re going to get to your questions but Bill, I want to ask you a few questions first. Bill, before we get going, we have Jeff King and Josh Loftus from our Finding Team here. And I thought before we get into details about what they’re working on, you might want to say a few words. I know the subject of Finding and making this experience better for our buyers is one that’s very important to you.
Bill Cobb: Yeah, it is, Griff, and thanks, it’s great to have you back. I hope you had a vacation. Tell us everything you did on your vacation.
Griff: I shepherded three neophyte friends around the UK and Italy.
Bill Cobb: Can you cut this short please?
Griff: Yeah. Well I was two weeks as a tour guide. But it was fun.
Bill Cobb: Okay. Thank you, Griff.
Griff: Sorry.
Bill Cobb: Hm. I love Griff.
Griff: And then we went…
Bill Cobb: Hah, hah. So this is our last Town Hall, as Griff said, before we head out to Boston for eBay Live! Hopefully, this will be a great conversation today and we wanted to talk about something, and we’re going to talk about this more in Boston. We’re going to have some really fun things to show the Community in Boston, that Philipp and his entire team are developing. But as Griff said, we wanted to spend some time on that, something we call here as Finding and I’m going to talk about that in a second. And that is you know, how do you find an item that is right for you, for buyers?
Now this is really important to us, and you have to think about eBay with the incredible breadth of inventory that our sellers list on our sight. Think about it, we have everything from collectibles, to a media item, we have heavy industrial machinery. It’s really terrific, the breadth of inventory. But obviously, we have to get people to that inventory, so improving the finding experience is no simple task. And Jeff King, who leads a team, in charge of Finding, and to show you how important this was, we were actually in a meeting a couple hours ago on this very topic. But I asked him to come by and talk about some of the progress his team has made, and it’s really phenomenal. And then any questions that the Community has, you know, Jeff and Josh will be here to answer them.
So Jeff, let me start with a couple of questions, but let me go right to the question that’s on everyone’s mind. Everybody else calls this thing “search”. We call it “Finding”. Why do we call this “Finding”?
Jeff King: That’s a great question actually, and I get that a lot. You know, I’ve actually been at eBay about four years and I think the best answer we can give for that is really the same reason that Disney didn’t call the moving, “Searching for Nemo.” They called it, “Finding Nemo”, right? And we all feel better when we have found that thing we are looking for, you know, when you’re searching for your keys and you found them, etc. And really, I think that’s the best answer I have. In general, eBay’s goal, and certainly the buyer’s goal, is to find the item that they’re looking for. And search is essentially just one of the many technologies that we utilize to help people find that rock’n deal that they can get nowhere else, really. And since my team is focused on creating more of those great Finding events, we thought it made more sense to call it “Finding” than search.
Bill Cobb: Yeah, and I think that, and Griff, you often talk about this also; I mean search is so clinical. I mean Finding, it’s just part of the fabric of eBay, so.
Griff: Yeah. And it’s interesting, I think that you know, we called it “search” sometimes but when you think of it from the aspect of calling it “Finding”, it’s a much more positive experience. It kind of connotes that you have found or you’re to find something, as opposed to search, which maybe you won’t find it. So and making it easier for buyers.
Bill Cobb: Yeah.
Griff: To do that actually, it’s an important thing.
Jeff King: Yeah.
Bill Cobb: So Jeff, fill us in about what your team’s working on and obviously, we’ll talk about this today and any questions, and then we’re going to talk more about it in Boston in a couple a weeks.
Jeff King: Okay, will do. Actually, there is a ton of exciting stuff that’s happening in Finding. My team is hard at work on some really incredible things. First off, a few weeks ago, we actually announced and started some important new tests that are actually out there for about 1% of the buyers in the US right now. We literally have over 30 different variations of the Finding experience that we’re testing, which is giving us some really good data on how buyers succeed on eBay that we’re incorporating back into our designs.
What is really important about what we’re testing is really, which features are relevant for which users and which categories. A couple of examples, you know, we’re testing our navigation tools. We want to understand how the navigation tools on eBay actually help buyers succeed. We know that you know, those users that actually use the navigation tool, as they find by category or related items or things like that are among the most successful buyers on eBay. And so we want to understand how actually showing navigation at the top of the page versus on the left side of the page actually performs and how we can actually impact and improve the buyer experience.
In addition, we have a number of intermediate pages that we actually surface and you might see these sometimes. Where you search for something very big, like ipod, and we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of items and we actually, instead of showing sort of an unrefined list of all of the items available, we surface an intermediate page to help people narrow and refine a bit before they see items. And we’re testing how that performs in certain situations and for certain users as well.
And you know, and something else that we’re testing, and this was mentioned on the Board Post, is basically returning more relevant items for each query. So rather than just looking at the keywords alone, actually going beyond just that and looking at the category that the items are in, the attributes that the items are in and the catalog properties that are available and essentially using all the data that we have available to return more relevant items to those buyers and really understanding and learning how that improves the buyer experience.
Bill Cobb: So you know, Jeff, I think and I get some emails from users and certainly, I think the announcement you made earlier in the month, I think sparked a lot of conversation on the boards. One of the questions is that it’s a lot of stuff to be testing. And you know, I’ve asked you this one too; talk about what you guys are trying to accomplish with this current round of tests.
Jeff King: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. You know, at the most basic level, these tests are all about trying to display the right items to the right buyer at the right time and in the right user experience. We’re hoping that we’re going to return more relevant items across more categories to more users, and in the end of course, our goal is to translate those items and that experience into more clicks, more bids and more purchases, which will of course, improve the marketplace.
Bill Cobb: And you know, I think that one of the things that probably we don’t talk about enough is because we talk about testing and people sometimes are in a test that you know, they have a new user experience, but I think talk about for a second, help the Community understand what you do actually, before you put things in a test. How much work actually goes into designs so that you know, we’re not just slapping things onto the site.
Jeff King: Yeah, that’s actually also really important. And what’s not visible to the Community is really, just the massive amount of pre-work that goes into the design and even the hypotheses around what we should build. We do extensive laboratory based user testing. And another thing that’s really fantastic about having access to this much traffic and this much user information, is we have access to two hundred forty-five million user queries a day. And the amount of insights that we can discern from that in just doing the data analysis across that much user information, really helps us make great decisions and really understand what things actually improve the buyer experience and what things are hurting them. You know, in addition, we just have an incredible Finding Team here. The development organization has been hard at work on Finding for years, and you can’t have a search system that is this robust with that many searches across that many items without having just a magnificent search team. And we’ve learned a ton from the experiments we’ve done; from Express, with Motors 2.0, and we’ve learned what are some really good things to do. We’ve also of course, learned some things not to do and we’re hoping to incorporate all of that into our Next Generation Finding experience that we’re testing now.