Ebay's chief product officer on growing the legacy marketplace

0:03Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast.

0:30How are you doing? I'm great, Cale. Great to see you. Thanks so much for having me today. Absolutely. So first, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're a boomerang for eBay. Is that right? I am a boomerang. I really cut my teeth here at eBay as a product manager a few years back and learned what it was like to build consumer-facing commerce experiences. Had the pleasure of working also at Sam's Club, part of Walmart. spent some time at Meta, and I returned almost a year ago to the day, returned back to eBay to work with this fantastic team. Well, happy anniversary. Thank you. I wanted to ask you, given that you worked at eBay a few years ago and you're back now, what would you say, how has the product changed now compared to what it was when you joined however many years ago?

1:20It's changed quite a bit. We are, and we're still, We're a work in progress. There's still a lot more that we need to change. But I love and part of what made me really excited to return back to eBay was the focus on our enthusiast customers, those buyers and sellers that are really passionate about the things that they trade in. and seeing us really lean into experiences and our focus categories that are not one-size-fits-all necessarily and that are going to help collectors and are going to help enthusiasts in the vehicle and parts and accessory spaces and refurbished electronics and home and garden, et cetera.

2:04And the fact that we've created a marketplace that has a higher bar of trust with things like our authenticity guarantee, all amazing innovation that eBay's done and excited to keep building on that. Got it. So let's go back to a year ago when you joined in April of 2022, correct? I guess that is where we are right now. We're a year from now. But anyway, what were the goals that you had the moment you stepped into the office? What did you want to make? What were you focused on? I was focused on getting closer to our customers, really embracing the community of eBay, which is the secret sauce behind the company from the start, and recommitting to that critical partnership.

2:54It's been a key message of mine to this team over the past year, creating a collaborative relationship with our customers to innovate and create a better eBay. And there's always, you know, I'm a perfectionist. There's always more I want to do, but we're making really good progress. Got it. I've used eBay for, I want to say, not as long as I've been alive, but it was a big part of me growing up as a person early on the web. And there was a very tight-knit enthusiast community back then, I would say. How would you say the community has changed or evolved now compared to, you know, I feel like it was a very tech-heavy eBay community.

3:34It was people, I thought of it about refurbished products or like getting a good deal on this or that. And now I think it has sort of a different connotation that you've been focused on. So can you walk me through that? I mean, the biggest change is just the scale of the platform. We have 134 million active global buyers. We're in 190 markets all around the world. Now, just because we have that scale, there still is that fundamental essence of the community experience. and that small business or that individual connecting with another to trade and to drive a greater sustainable commerce experience or to get deeper in their enthusiast passions.

4:23So in some ways, we're the same. And in other ways, we've evolved and scaled. And the experience is certainly different. You mentioned the authentication part. And I I know that's something that eBay has been focusing on a lot. I know it goes into many different parts of the business that are probably beyond your purview. But on the product side, how do you build that so that the user experience is one where they actually know what authentication is, understand the process, and feel a relative amount of trust about it? Yeah, trust is what it's all about. And on the product, the product and the operations part of authenticity guarantee, all those things have to come together seamlessly.

5:01I learned a lot about that in my time at Sam's Club, that great products really span the technology and the operational part of the experience. And so, you know, AG, as we call it internally, or Authenticity Guarantee, it's embedded throughout the experience. You see it in search. You see it in the item pages. We have amazing video content on the site to help our customers understand it. It's embedded in the fabric of the experience. from finding an item to buying it, to having it shipped, to the post-shipment experience. So you said that community has been the biggest focus that you've had over this last year.

5:41How has that manifested into either new products or new endeavors that you've been focusing on over the last year? Yeah, it's really about our everyday work to build better solutions for our buyers and sellers. I always talk about the fact that you don't build great experiences with version one of anything. You really have to earn that and fight through it through this iterative persistence and to have your customers alongside you as you are doing that. I'll point to an example where we created a new unified listing flow for our consumer to consumer sellers. pretty early on. That was in the middle of rollout when I returned.

6:27And we just learned so much every week, looking at the analytics, talking to customers, looking at the survey data. We got some things right. We got some things wrong. And so, for example, we had to simplify how sellers shared attribute information about our listings. We had to do a second and third pass on that. And we've done it. We're seeing higher completion rates. We're seeing higher satisfaction rates from our sellers in that experience. It takes persistence, and it takes a lot of humility and a lot of listening to customers, both through the data and through the qualitative side as well.

7:04How do you do that when you're in so many different areas? So you mentioned how the scale of eBay is so much more vast than it was decades ago. But you also deal with many niche communities. So you deal with sneakerheads, you deal with luxury fashion, you deal with all these different things. And I imagine you need a different type of flow and you need a different, maybe a different type of UI in order to really work with those. So how do you build that when you're working with so many different niche communities? That's why I love this job. It's one of the most fun aspects of working at eBay.

7:36The fact that we have so many different types of customers and communities that we have to serve. And I'll go back to that selling example. we realized pretty quickly that there were so many opportunities in some of these niches to improve the experience and we started with sneakers as an example so when we when we detect that you're selling a sneaker the ux actually shifts and changes to optimize for that category so we have deeper integration with the catalog of sneakers that we have we will guide you through the photos and the angles that we think drive the best conversion in that experience.

8:21So we're building platforms that will give us greater flexibility and ability to morph based on that intent that the seller or the buyer has for a particular category or situation. Like, do you have a dedicated team for each category to figure out what is the best, or how do you prioritize making it so that it all works? This is a great inside baseball question. We have both. So we have dedicated focus category teams, but then we also have horizontal domain teams. And that interplay between those two is really important and really helpful because there are some changes we need to do that rise the tide across every category of eBay.

9:10one of my favorite examples there is search you know the work that team is doing with deep learning models increasing our recall increasing our precision and the search experience those are very horizontal wins at the same time per my example in selling we do have to create really tailored experiences to win in particular categories and it's ultimately about delighting the customer. And this is one of the profound changes in how eBay approaches its business in the last few years from what it was doing before that. Really caring about the details and getting narrow on the customer problem in these key categories.

9:50Got it. I wanted to actually ask you about search because that's something we'll probably go more into it when we talk about emerging tech and that kind of thing. But it's a question I ask a lot of people in your shoes, which is how are you thinking about discovery? Because eBay is a really interesting platform where you have a lot of people with specific intent. I'm searching, I want these pair of Nike Jordans. I want this HP laptop. But also I imagine that there are people who come to ebay.com just to sort of like browse. And so how are you thinking about like working that? Because I think that's the biggest problem that most e-commerce platforms has is that walking the line between intention and discovery.

10:29Yeah, that's right. we've made great progress and continue to make progress for that precision for the buyer who knows what they want. We need to increasingly improve the experience for discovery and the unstructured experience. And a product I love that we're working on now is our collections experience, where our buyers could put together the best set of LeBron James cards or the best set of rookie cards from a given year. And over time, you'll see that will infuse more and more of that through the experience. I'll also point to the work in our vehicles category. We've done a lot of work in the past year on my garage and on the fitment experience.

11:25So now you could tell us these are the vehicles that I own or that I'm passionate about. I might be trying to restore a 1971 Shelby Mustang. Great. Now that we know that, we can help you not only discover what you need to work on that car, but we're increasingly introducing content into the eBay experience. And you can check out our eBay Motors app to see this in action. will show you, okay, if you need to do particular jobs on this car, this is the full suite of stuff you're going to need. And we're helping you discover what to get. So yeah, a lot of work in our roadmap on browse and discovery that's coming.

12:08And do you curate either the homepage of the Motors app or the homepage of the baseball cards page specifically for that community? Have you done research into, we know that this is what these types of people like, and so we're going to have a slightly different design than what you would if you just went to eBay.com? Yeah. There's a lot of work in AI to tailor what the buyer sees based on their preferences and what they care about. The UX is still pretty standard across the two. It's a balance, right? Because you don't want to dramatically change the experience because that could become disorienting to a shopper.

12:57So we're working on that and we're iterating on that is figuring out where to tailor it and personalize and where to have consistency so that the experience is predictable. And so it's not disruptive to the mental model of that shopper. So there's a lot of really fascinating work along those lines. Can you talk just about how, you know, I feel like eBay is a company that everybody knows about and it's, you know, people have used it for years and they've used it for a variety of use cases. But now that you're focused, you know, you have the scale and you're focusing on expanding. What is the philosophy behind new products so that it's about getting people who might not have thought to use eBay before?

13:39Is it about the products itself? Like we're trying to get this type of enthusiast or are you trying to make it more accessible in other ways? How do you think about that? We could do a podcast just on this topic by itself. So, look, enthusiasts come in all shapes and sizes. And in some cases, we have customers who are deeply passionate about their trading cards, about re-commerce and fashion, about furniture. And in other cases, we need to introduce these concepts and help people know where to begin in their journey. So I'll just give you an example just to be more clear about this. We're thinking a lot about the onboarding experience for someone selling for the first time.

14:36And taking the complex, it could be an overwhelming process, figuring out, okay, where do I start? What photos do I take? What do I really need to say about this item? What shipping options should I be using? Should I even use auction or should I use buy it now? And so again, this comes back to the AI and the work we're doing to tailor that experience, not only by category, but on where that person is in their sophistication of shopping and using eBay. And we're tailoring the experience appropriately. Got it. We talk a lot about enthusiasts, and I know that you guys have made some really interesting acquisitions of late for enthusiast communities.

15:17So TCG player, that's the collectible marketplace, right? And I know that you had last year the NFT marketplace known origin. How do you think about bringing those into the fold? Are those about the enthusiasts who are already part of them? Is that thinking about the tech that they use? How do those work alongside the overall eBay program? Well, we want to create the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts. So we're not satisfied with, although it's extremely valuable to have items that people bid on or just buy it now and secure those treasures and find those treasures on eBay. We want to keep pushing the value that we're providing our customers.

16:02And so whether that's TCG player really unlocking all the amazing inventory and hobby shops all over the country and bringing that inventory to eBay or the work we're doing in live commerce to create real time interactions between buyers and sellers in a completely new format. that, we want to keep innovating and finding new ways to create those connections. Can you talk a little bit more about the live commerce part? I think that's something that a lot of platforms have gotten into in the last few years with varying degrees of success, it seems like. Or it seems that everyone thought the US would glom onto it in the pandemic, and some have, some haven't.

16:49So how are you approaching it? What are you seeing in terms of consumption, et cetera? We're really excited about it. I think it's a perfect fit for eBay and our enthusiasts. I was talking to a seller recently who, through the chat and the real-time interaction that she was having with buyers on an eBay live stream, she realized that there was inventory that she hadn't even listed on eBay that these buyers on the stream were talking about. And she went and eventually got those and listed them and drove sales. You know, we did, just to give you a sense, last year at New York Comic Con, we had over 20 ,000 people join an eBay live stream.

17:38And it allows us to connect with those enthusiasts and not only make it more fun, but to learn from them and for sellers to just build that deeper relationship. So we're bullish on it. And we're continuing to iterate and experiment. And we're bringing increasing auction capabilities to our eBay Live commerce product. So yeah, we're going to keep going. Are there certain categories that specifically work well with live commerce? Yeah, I think wherever there's... It's not for every category. I think it makes a lot of sense where there's just deeper understanding of the product, or there's a connection or a story that that seller wants to tell.

18:28And our sellers are just amazing. They are entrepreneurs. They are experts in all of these passions that we've been talking about. And so to hear directly from them on a live stream is just a richer experience, and everybody wins from that. So in particular, we're excited about collectibles, trading cards, fashion, and we're going to keep trying it wherever we could form that better connection between a buyer and a seller. I want to go into the fashion side of things, or I know that eBay has been focusing a lot on sort of building out its luxury side. And so can you talk about how you're approaching that?

19:14Because that's a very specific type of community. There is a specific type of trust. And I know authentication plays a big role in that, but it's also just a certain cultural cachet, I guess you could say. And so how have you been approaching that on the product side and building a product that luxury buyers, enthusiasts feel comfortable and want to go on and buy things? Well, we play across the whole spectrum of fashion. But a special focus has been creating that trusted experience. And it comes back to the authenticity guarantee. And knowing that the sneaker, the handbag, the piece of jewelry that I'm buying, that I could shop with confidence, that it's trusted, that it's verified.

19:59our team members in the Authenticity Guarantee Centers are amazing to spend time with. They know so much about these categories, even to the point where for a pair of sneakers or for a handbag, they're looking at the stitching and understanding, okay, like what is the condition of this product and can we stand behind it? So I think that's a game changer for our shoppers on eBay to have that confidence when they shop. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about sort of the final part of the experience. You mentioned how you've been focusing on making listings more seamless and tell, you know, sellers the right angles.

20:40What have you been looking at in terms of the checkout part that has worked to get more people to transact? Because I feel like that's a big hiccup that a lot of platforms have is where they haven't been able to quite figure out, you know, there's a lot of abandoned carts, there's this, there's that. How are you thinking about that. Yeah, we have dedicated scrum teams just on this to analyze the funnel, to find where there's friction, and to just keep, again, it goes back to iterative persistence, like keep taking friction out of the experience. And while doing that, we're also looking at some really cool innovation.

21:17So I love our eBay International Shipping Program, where, for For example, I'm a seller and without doing any extra work, my item could be available globally and we'll take care of all of it. We'll take care of the duties. We'll take care of all of the paperwork required to ship something across borders. And even if there's a return, we'll take care of that too. Sometimes our sellers, our beginner sellers tell us, yeah, I don't want to ship internationally because then dealing with returns is difficult. So with eBay International Shipping, we take care of all of that. So it all comes back down to the theme of taking friction out of the experience so that people could trade and do the fun stuff.

22:07We'll do the hard stuff. They get to do the fun stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's always good for the individual sellers. I feel like it's interesting for a platform like yours where you have a lot of individual sellers selling one-off things, but then you also have professionals who are selling a large suite of things. And so how do you approach building one that targets both? Because I think that that's something that's very unique to eBay compared to other platforms out there. Well, in particular on the selling side, we're very mindful of this, and we don't try to force fit everybody through the same experience.

22:40So we have the flows in the app and on the site that are for the individual or the very small seller. We have selling tools for those sellers that start to scale and really start running businesses. It's one of the things that I'm most proud of is to see how many people start off as a casual trader on eBay who then create businesses. And, you know, we call them the accidental entrepreneurs who grow and start employing people. So we have the selling tools, you know, like Seller Hub and our bulk listing tools for those people and those businesses that emerge out of the eBay ecosystem. And then, of course, you know, we have all the APIs so that even tools that are off the platform, you know, we want to create a very open marketplace.

23:26And so we have a robust set of APIs for people to engage in the eBay marketplace, even with tools that we don't directly manage. Got it. I wanted to switch gears again, because you mentioned this with the search thing, and I wanted to ask you sort of a broader question. There are a lot of buzzwords specifically now, chat GBT, things like that. I know a lot of platforms are trying to integrate them, usually in terms of search or customer service. What are you thinking about in terms of these sort of new emerging technologies that have been written about a lot? We're really, really excited about the potential of them.

24:01I so wish I could announce things right now, but I can't. We'll come back later. Put a pin on that. But we're not only looking at it from a customer-facing experience, but we're looking at it in terms of tools to unleash the potential of our teams and to help our developers be more efficient and be more productive, which will ultimately help them better serve our community. So there's a lot that we're doing behind the scenes there, and we're excited to increasingly talk about it when it's ready for primetime. You've been in this role for about a year now. Has your focus shift? Do you have any new priorities that you really want to hit in 2023 that you didn't hit in 2022?

24:51What's on the roadmap? We got to do more. We're really proud of our progress at taking friction out of the experience for sellers and buyers, helping make search better, creating a greater sense of trust on the platform with authenticity guarantee and our vault for trading cards. but we're just getting started. There's so much more ahead. And it's creating, the phrase I love to use with the team is we're creating experiences that the eBay community deeply loves. And we're going to continue, the roadmap is all about continuing to get us closer and closer to that aspiration. What's great about eBay is we're the engine to help people find the treasures that they care about.

25:44and it's been fun seeing that come to life in sneakers and handbags and for our car enthusiasts. And we're going to keep making it better for them and also take on some more categories in the future as well. So what kind of categories should we be looking out for? And should we be looking out for new specific features or just what are the big things that you think are in the near future? I'm not ready to pull the curtain back on anything quite at this moment, But I'll tell you, the battle's not yet won, and it never is, honestly, in the categories we've talked about. We're going to keep making the experience better in parts and accessories for our cars.

26:27In collectibles, there's so many things we're excited about. For example, we talked about shifting the selling experience for sneakers. we want to do that for trading cards as well as other categories and using AI to morph the experience to delight our customers in those in those categories so yeah so much more to come the roadmap is loaded and and we're excited to ship so much great stuff in the coming months and years amazing well Eddie this has been a great conversation thanks so much for joining Thank you so much. It was great talking to you.