Every shopping experience is unique, and every shopper has specific wants and needs. That is one of the biggest struggles brands face in the world of ecommerce. How do you create a customer experience that resonates with and meets the needs of drastically different customers?

This problem is magnified further when you run a marketplace that sells literally millions of different products to tens of millions of different users. 

eBay has 180 million active users, which, according to Bradford Shellhammer, means that there needs to be 180 million different eBays to meet each of those users’ exact needs. Bradford is the Vice President of Buyer Experience at eBay, and part of his job is to make every eBay user fall in love with their eBay experience.

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Bradford explains what that looks like in practical terms, including how they approached a home page redesign, the importance of testing and experimentation, and the methods they have used to build trust among users.  

Main Takeaways:

• Do You Trust Me?: Trust is an essential part of the buying experience, and these days, companies are finding more innovative ways to establish trust with users. In marketplaces, typical product reviews might not be the best way to build trust with shoppers, instead, you have to find alternative ways to connect with customers and intervene if something goes wrong. 
• Please Rate And Review: Gathering feedback and information from users is a critical method companies use to improve their customer experience. Typically, brands will send out surveys or ask for feedback in an email, but there are better, more strategic and enticing ways to get the feedback you need. And sometimes that means utilizing channels you may not have traditionally relied on or creating brand new customer feedback channels yourself.
• Test, Test, Test Again: Nothing should be added to your website or brand experience unless it has been thoroughly tested. Both internal and external experimentation is necessary to ensure that when you make a change, or add something to your site, you already know that it is what your customers want and it works the way it was designed to work.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Joining us today is Bradford Shellhammer, the Vice President of the Buyer Experience at eBay. Bradford, welcome.

Bradford:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Stephanie:

Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. eBay, such an awesome name brand. I'm excited to dive into all things eBay. I've been a long time buyer there. But first, I want to go into your background of what brought you to eBay? I see that you founded a couple companies, a couple ecommerce companies and I was hoping you can touch on that before we jump into eBay.

Bradford:

Yeah. I think it's super cool to talk about because it's actually super personal. For me, it's a pretty interesting story. So, it's a love affair, essentially, between myself and eBay. I've been a buyer on the platform since 1999 because we can trace back and see in our internal database how long we've been shopping and when we created our account.

Bradford:

So, I've been a customer of eBay for over 20 years. And the companies that I started, two of the three were marketplaces. And they were marketplaces that were really founded on two principles, both of them, one was for buyers, helping them find treasure, awesome stuff, unique things, feeling some passion or interest and for seller is propping up the little guy.

Bradford:

Both of the companies that I found at Fab and Bezar were both heavily in the design space, in the modern design space, so that's furniture, graphic arts, posters, lighting, jewelry, handbags, accessories and things so fashion design, but my personal love affair with collecting.

Bradford:

I have over 400 pairs of shoes. I have a massive art collection. I have probably more chairs than most people. Most of these purchases over the last 25 years have been made on eBay. And so, for me, I've inspired by the hunt on eBay what we call internally the eBay a power user, a power customer.

Bradford:

And now, I have this awesome responsibility to help other people fall in love with and use eBay the way that I do. So, I was hired four and a half years ago. I met the chief product officer who had some interest in one of my companies, Bezar.

Bradford:

Turns out I sold that to another company, an Australian company, and I became a free market... was on the market and I was a free agent. And I'd never really worked at a real company before, a big company, the previous 12 years is doing my own thing.

Bradford:

And so, they said, "Well, come join eBay." And my first role was the chief curator of eBay. And frankly, it was a made up role. And everyone thought I had great taste. And when I got to eBay, I really thought my job was going to be curating through eBay and surfacing that up to consumers.

Bradford:

And what I quickly realized is that eBay scale is so much bigger than one person's taste. And that some people are curating parts for a vintage Mercedes on eBay. And some people like myself are collecting design, and maybe other people are just using eBay because they have six kids, and money's tight and buying them all new iPhones is just not possible, so they're looking for great deals.

Bradford:

And so, I really quickly just became very empathetic to the eBay customer's journey and it said, "Wow. Bradford, this is not about you. Can you help build tools to help other people find the things that they love rather than forcing your point of view or something that you love on people?"

Bradford:

And then, I moved into our product org, my second year and the first project I took on was our homepage. We redesigned it. We built a lot of new algorithms and it became a science powered hub for you. And the goal was that there's 180 million active buyers on eBay.

Bradford:

There should be 180 million different eBays because everybody's eBay is different. It's not like other big box retailers or other mass market ecommerce players where we're buying commodity products or everybody's buying the same thing.

Bradford:

And my team really builds the experience that should adapt and respond to customer's interest and helping them find what they're looking for.

Stephanie:

That's great. So, taking on the homepage design seems like a lot of responsibility. Tell me a bit about what that looked like. I mean, what are the customer buying behavior look like before and what do they look like now and how did you get there?

Bradford:

Yeah. That's a good question. So, I inherited an experience that was about five years old and it was called the Feed and that was the homepage. And it was a Pinterest-esque experience. And so, when customers would save things, we have this concept called saving, there's a little heart, you click on it and it saves.

Bradford:

You can save a search. You can save a seller. You can watch a single individual item. It would populate a visual grid of like products that are related to that. The problem with that is that it required customers to groom their own experience. And so, for power customers, the feed was awesome.

Bradford:

Because like myself, I have 150 saved searches and it's just this beautiful grid of new products populating every day of hitting all the either brands that I'm following or the sellers that I love what they're selling. But for the normal shopper, not your power customer, they were really missing out on personalized content because we literally required them to do work to curate it themselves.

Bradford:

So, the project that we decided to do is, was there a hybrid of that? Could you still have some of that content for the power user be front and center on the homepage?

Bradford:

But could you have machine learning and science pick up behaviors patterns of just what people are clicking on or searching for or which emails they're opening and have that be enough to curate a homepage experience without them having to do the explicit work of saying show me more of this on clicking on a heart or saying I want to save this.

Bradford:

And so, what happened was more people with as a result of that first product we launched, more people ended up having personalized content which was a win. Because previously, it was personalized content mostly ju