Calibrating the goals

Background

The eBay seller experience encompasses a versatile toolkit (Seller Hub) that facilitates various essential functions. These include inventory management, listing creation and editing, buyer communication, and market research, among others. Since its launch in 2015, this toolkit has continually evolved, incorporating a steady stream of enhancements and novel features across its 7-tab L1 architecture.

Over the years the tool set had become rather feature-saturated with overlapping ingress points supporting similar tasks. When we discuss integration into Seller Hub, we mean a colossal challenge of triangulating a multitude of user journeys and distilling those into patterns to ensure a holistic end-to-end experience.

How Advertising fits in

Advertising is the accelerant of Selling. It is impossible to think of Advertising as a standalone value outside its parent seller experience. As such it was critical to account for contextual value for placements (buyer-facing) and management (seller-facing) and account for all touch points within seller journeys.

It was not enough to create a centralized “hub” for Ads, it was just as important to instill the value of advertising along the most contextual ingress points and seller mental modes.

The starting point

The 2016 advertising product landscape consisted of a single small pilot program that yielded around $44M in annual ads revenue. The experience was isolated from the main seller tool set IA using its own variation of proprietary UI components. Navigationally, it was connected to the L1 (Marketing) tab by a simple link in a messaging banner and had little to no affiliation with seller user flows.

The CPA (Cost per Ad) model was chosen as a low-risk introduction of eBay’s advertising services to sellers. The value proposition was simple: you only pay if your item sells, offering a highly enticing and low-risk sales accelerator. By doing so, eBay had cast a hard ethical link between customer success and its own and the program set course for a stable YoY growth. As of 2024, eBay is the only large marketplace that offers this low-risk advertising model to sellers.

Core value: low risk

Promoted Listings Standard (PLS) enhances your items’ visibility in search results, reaching thousands or even millions of additional shoppers. With PLS, you pay only when an item sells and the sale is attributed to the program within a 30-day window from the first “promoted” click.

The Ad Rate, derived from your marketing budget, determines your advertising cost. Sellers can adjust the Ad Rate strategically to be more or less competitive. Higher Ad Rates lead to increased visibility (impressions) for your listings. Factors like category-level competition, seasonality, and marketplace supply/demand ratios influence the Ad Rate, which currently ranges from 2% to approximately 25% of the listed price.

Within the first 3 years PLS adoption has transformed from common practice to an essential tool for ~45% of eBay sellers by the end of 2020.

The expansion

By the early 2017 eBay had plenty of revenue indicators that it was (fiscally) moving in the right direction. Based on first YoY metrics the leadership had made a decision to begin an aggressive expansion of advertising services. While the team’s energy was robust, we faced the urgency to execute, often competing against the clock. Predictably, there was a degree of bias for action between competing tracks that established their own product value in isolation from the consortium of new products.

Being the sole (Principal designer) for newly formed eBay Ads, I braced for influx of ideas that would come at various speeds and from various directions and without evident collective understanding of what exactly defines an “advertising portfolio”.

Applying the brakes

This was the time to employ collective systems-thinking in how we would evaluate the individual criteria of incoming tracks and, above all, how would they fit into a whole of a holistic advertising portfolio based on their individual merits, metrics and seller value.

All of these factors had brought on an urgent need for an unified methodology for validating and incorporating incoming products into a holistic fabric of the upcoming advertising experience. All while understanding its relationship with neighboring L1 experience pillars.

Goals redefined