eBay’s Chaos Theory

The Heir Apparent As president of eBay Marketplaces, John Donahoe is charged with reinvigorating the core business. “Our number-one strategic priority,” he says, “is improving the buyer experience—making it fun again.”

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The misstep triggered headlines, a falling stock price, and pointed questions from analysts. Whitman explained repeatedly that the marketplace was out of balance. In March 2006, eBay rolled back the program. Finally, in August the company used its only real lever: It raised fees for store listings.

That fiasco became the catalyst for overhauling the buyer experience. Carey asked for a detailed report: When were shoppers abandoning the site? How much were they scrolling through the new search results? He discovered that there was no mechanism to create such a report. It took "many, many, many hours and days and weeks," he says, to unravel exactly what customers were doing. It turned out that eBay collected all sorts of data about transactions--"It knew that business like the back of its hand," Carey says--but little related to shopping. "I said, 'We got gaps in the data. We got holes,'" he recalls. And his mission was to plug them.

Carey grew up in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, where his father operated the family's furniture-and-appliance store. It was located in a four-story building, the tallest in town. As a boy, he dusted furniture in the showroom and rode the elevator for fun. As a teenager, he delivered air-conditioners, sold bedroom suites, repaired TVs. Meanwhile, his mother was working for IBM in information systems. "When we were young, she used to take me and my brother to the data center, and we'd sleep on the floor in her office while she wrote programs on punch cards," Carey says.

After graduating from Oklahoma State University, he went to work for Wal-Mart as a programmer trainee, combining his retail and tech know-how. On his first day, he wrote a program automating a sales report for Sam Walton about the Sam's Club stores--all 12 of them. The IT department was small enough, with only 300 or so employees, that he met Wal-Mart's CIO early on. "I think I'm going to want to do your job one day," Carey told him.

The CIO invited the 24-year-old to work alongside him for six months and learn the ropes. Carey eventually had a hand in developing virtually all of Wal-Mart's major systems, from software that analyzed every inch of shelf space to programs that identified inefficiencies in the company's global supply chain. "The lesson there was, it's all in the data," he says. "If you start with the lowest level of detail, you can answer any question about the business."

He'd watched from Bentonville, Arkansas, over the years as colleagues left for tech companies like Amazon and Dell, and when eBay came calling, he was intrigued. Still, leaving the only employer he'd ever had was terrifying. "You've got no idea how hard that was," he drawls. "No idea."

Before moving to San Jose, Carey put the family's dining room set up for auction on eBay. It sold within days. "A retired couple in Hot Springs drove in with a truck and picked it up," he says. "I thought, Wow, that's $1,000, man! This is totally powerful."

He got his first taste of the eBay culture on day one. Everyone works in cubicles, but executives get individual conference rooms, decorated in a theme their colleagues pick out: Blondie for Whitman. Dennis the Menace for Donahoe. And Elmer Fudd for Carey, an avid hunter. Seeing his conference room for the first time--with two double-barrel toy shotguns mounted on the wall, plus a couple of comic-book covers--he remembers thinking, "Okaaay. Am I in the wrong room?"

Carey set about creating what he calls a "culture of analytics," particularly around buyers and product development. More experimenting, more testing, more data. "I want to eliminate feelings and get down to true math," he says. In just 10 months, his team built a faster and more flexible technology platform. His developers also began testing applications on small randomly selected samples of the eBay population (typically 1% or 2%).

In the old eBay, one former engineer had so many failed launches that he had earned the unfortunate nickname the Rollback King. Now, if a new feature doesn't improve buyer engagement--a new metric, in which return visits, bidding, buying, and other activities are weighted--it doesn't graduate from trials to reach a broader audience. "In a Darwinian sense," says Billingsley, one of eBay's top developers, "to be a survivor, something has to keep producing."

The evolution of the eBay search engine is continuing, driven by the need to boost browsing and sales. One step is to give shoppers more relevant information, more rapidly. Until recently, the search engine relied on sellers' product descriptions. When you typed in the name of a product or brand, the software looked for those words in the sellers' 55-word listings. The results were then ranked according to the closing date of the auctions. If you entered "John Deere," you could get a listing for a John Deere tractor or a set of John Deere sheets. By eBay's definition, both were equally relevant.