Advertiser mental model

Designing for eBay sellers

Many profitable products have been build on mirroring existing experiences. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and IG Reels adopt similar UI designs to align with user expectations. Consistency ensures a familiar experience and mitigates risks, simply because you’re embarking on building something that had already proven its value. But this coin often comes with a hidden flip side.

For eBay specifically, the idea of simply porting over an existing product, a feature or a ready-made UI has never proven itself well. The selling experience is comprised of features that have been evolving along its own proprietary evolutionary chain of enhancements over a long period of time. The seller-facing features often aim to compensate for shortcomings that other (often neighboring features), had left behind. Overtime, the lack of overarching methodology has created a maze of user paths that sellers use in accordance with their skills and familiarity and had taken a toll on overall continuity. The realities of the seller experience, being the superset of advertising demanded a very “native” approach to how we might embed the upcoming advertising portfolio into its parent platform.

With that, my task was not to build a framework for industry-level advertisers, but to convert existing eBay sellers into advertisers by instilling the added value into the heart of the existing and very specific seller experience.

The universal baseline

In our daily lives, we engage in a fascinating dance between data, insights, and action. Long before advertising or even commerce, humans have been making decisions in a single universal sequence.

In advertiser terms

Countless qualitative data dn competitive analysis point to the very same baseline chain remaining intact when we juxtapose it against the L0 advertising mental model.

Resulting DNA of the advertising lifecycle

The perpetual chain reaction

In this cyclical process, data fuels insights, which drive action. Advertisers continuously iterate, adjusting their strategies based on real-world outcomes. It’s a dance of data and creativity, where each step informs the next, progressively developing skills and reflexes.

Working hypothesis

The path of repetition and practice is the most most reliable course one can take to success. Again, in a very human sense advertising should be no different from learning any other skill. More concretely, over the course of multiple repetitions of the same sequence a seller would develop a reliable advertising acumen over time.

However, “time” would eventually become a factor that would disprove this seemingly solid conclusion.