Interview: Andre Haddad, eBay

Sep 29, 2004

Andre Haddad is the Vice President of eBay's User Experience & Design (UED). He's in charge of the user experience for eBay's 114 million registered users. Andre was also a speaker at Gel 2004 (his talk is available on the Gel 2004 conference DVD).

During our interview, Andre listed five major tradeoffs, and why eBay's decisions within those tradeoffs necessarily make the seller's experience somewhat complex.

Q - What's going on at eBay these days?

A lot of international expansions. China is coming on strong, and our efforts there are accelerating. We've also made an acquisition in India, taking a 100% stake in Baazee.com.

Q - What about the Craigslist investment?

That's a somewhat different story. eBay took a minority stake in Craigslist. We're not going to be changing much in the way Craig runs his company. But it's fascinating. In the area of classifieds, we're looking forward to getting more insights into how it works, how users use it, how it compares to eBay, and seeing if there's an opportunity for eBay there.

Q - I recently had a difficult customer experience on eBay, trying to sell a single book. I was surprised at how hard it was to set up the selling process. Then I saw Bob Tedeschi's Sept 2. New York Times article, talking about how it's so hard to sell that third-party "drop-off" locations are springing up all over. So... how would you describe the selling process? Is it difficult, perhaps necessarily so?

Yes. Selling is much more complex than buying on eBay. Our research, in labs and online and in ethnographic studies, indicate that there are several difficulties with selling on eBay. Some are within our control, like user experience and design-related issues, which stakeholders in the company can influence. There are also a lot of factors that we can't really influence, where we can't help the prospective seller much.

1. Tradeoff: Ease-of-use vs. customer safety

One of the things we know is a big barrier to selling is seller verification. In order to open a seller's account on eBay, we ask for specific banking and credit card information that is critical to our trust and safety systems. They are incredibly effective in helping us prevent fraud from happening, but from a user experience standpoint, a lot of people are reluctant to provide eBay with their checking account information - especially people who aren't going to create a business on eBay, but just want to sell a book, or have a casual usage of eBay as a seller. This is one of the themes that we struggle with, the tradeoff between verification requirements and ease-of-use. We try to find the right balance between the two.

2. Tradeoff: buyer/seller experience

Another theme is seller ease-of-use and buyer experience. As you can imagine, all the information the seller provides when listing items are critical to buyers finding and bidding on the item with confidence. We want to have the buyer experience as easy and confident as possible, providing key information that they need in order to bid or buy the item. That includes a lot of things that are not so easy for sellers. Like a photo - it's not required, but a lot of people fail when they try to attach a photo, and that discourages them from completing the listing. But a photo is critical for buyers to bid. Without it, items are dramatically less attractive.

We also have requirements in the buyer experience, in the areas of categorizing the item in the right place. That can be quite daunting for sellers, because we have over 50,000 categories. Sellers sometimes get confused about certain specific categories. For example, where would you list sports memorabilia - in "sports" or "collectibles"? There are questions like that for practically everything that is vintage, used, or collectible. You could expect to find clothes in "vintage," not "collectible." We try to see what customers are doing, and try to orient sellers to the right category structure. But that's not easy when there are over 29 million items available on eBay at any given time.

Another tradeoff of the buyer/seller experience is the information we require on the item itself - what is the description; can you describe it in a way that's as specific and informative as possible. Sellers sometimes don't know what to write about it, how to price it, or what sort of shipping services to choose. The tradeoff between buyer and seller experience is tricky, and we've tried to maximize the ease-of-use for both.

Q - Does that reflect in the statistic, included in Bob Tedeschi's column, that 90% of eBay's registered users are buyers?

Yes, absolutely. Though most buyers eventually become sellers. From a UX standpoint, one of the challenges my team and I have is to make the selling task on eBay to be what you really want to do on eBay. We don't want a one-size-fits-all experience for everyone, from the new seller who just wants to sell a book, to a businessperson who's created a business on eBay and wants to sell lots of things.

3. Tradeoff: Ease-of-use for new users vs. power for experienced users

It's not easy to have one experience that fits all these different needs. We've developed different interfaces, recommendations to help users without having to research a lot, and tools - either online or desktop software that allows bigger sellers to scale. The new seller's problems are more transparent, because you can project yourself into their problems. But experienced users have other problems. They're very vocal, and they ask us to solve problems that don't necessarily impact sellers trying to figure out eBay. Sometimes the two groups have quite different priorities.

4. Tradeoff: Key decisions made by system vs. seller

One direction we've taken, for new sellers, is that the system makes certain choices for you, instead of you making all the choices. That makes a lot of sense for new sellers, but existing sellers don't like it. They have their own ways of doing things, and they don't typically like eBay making certain key decisions on their behalf - like pricing, describing an item, recommending shipping, payment services, things like that. That's a really an issue where we're always trying to balance the interests of different groups.

5. Tradeoff: Personalization vs. cost/ROI

The fifth theme is cost: creating different flows for a totally customizable system, a totally personalizable system, is quite costly. You might be tempted to create very a intelligent system that does the right thing at the right time for the right user, but that's easier said than done. There are other issues, like the discoverability of customizable features, that make it not as easy to find and use as you'd expect, which makes the ROI on these investments more difficult to achieve than you'd think.

So, those are the five themes that we try to focus on, to try to find the right tradeoffs, the right balance as people sell on eBay. Safety; buyer/seller experience; ease-of-use for new vs. experienced sellers; decisions made by the system or the seller; and personalization vs. cost/ROI.

Q - Some difficulties in the eBay user experience have been "fixed" by third-party sites offering features that plug into eBay. For example, what do you think about sites like RSSauction.com and Pluck.com, which allow buyers to create custom eBay searches?

We look at those sites and are delighted with the innovation. We spend a lot of time and resources - engineering money, and product development money - in our efforts to open up the eBay platform to third-party developers. We have an entire team focused on the developer community. We have a lot of developers who have created more sophisticated niche apps for experienced buyers, like the rssauction site, as well as various apps for sellers. We're very happy when we see this happening. When we get our developer community excited, we know we're going to see a lot of innovation, and innovation is going to make the eBay platform more attractive for trading in general.

We know we can't provide the best solution for everyone, so instead of trying to do that and maintain control, we try to do everything we do as well as possible, knowing there are lots of tradeoffs. There are other companies that don't have to deal with those tradeoffs, since they work with specific markets and customer groups. We enable them to do that.

Our subsite http://developer.ebay.com shows what we have for the developer community, and http://solutions.ebay.com lists all the third-party solutions we know of.

Q - That's a strategic commitment to customer experience, isn't it? You watch what your most loyal customers do, and then you enable that innovation to flourish.

Yes, we've had that focus from the beginning, although it's not explicitly labeled as "customer experience." One of our guiding principles is keeping the community front and center. Pierre [Omidyar, eBay founder] gave us an incredible legacy of involving the community in strategic decisions AND policy decisions.

In the Gel conference speech that I gave, I tried to explain that user experience at eBay is a lot more than the actual experience on the eBay.com website. Most of the experience is determined by interactions with other members of the community - interactions that we don't control. We try to create the right environment, with the right policies and enforcement with customer support, by listening to customer feedback and e-mails, boards which are very active and vocal, and in our policies, pricing, category structure, etc. etc.

If the community is successful, we're successful. We make money when they're successful. That's the pure-business way of looking at it. The other way to see it, which Pierre cares more about, is the concept of empowerment. eBay creates opportunities for people to do things that they could never do before: for sellers to create business, for people who work from home who don't want 9-to-5 jobs, for supplementing one's income on eBay; for buyers with specific passions to collect things by buying them on eBay; and for developers to actually create applications that make money, thanks to eBay - that's the broadest definition of empowerment. We want to teach people to fish instead of feed them.

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